Hello fellow translators,
(please CC: as I am not subscribed).
The french translation team has a very impressive structure and is
highly successfull in getting large chunks translated. As far as I can
see, there seem to be an asignement for each document, so that
responsibilities are clear when (original) documents change.
There is one thing lacking, however. I currently translate the
consultants from the Debian web page. Several times I have noticed
obvious errors in the original text (e.g. mixed captialization,
spelling errors, inconsistent usage of spaces, even untranslated
phrases (see below)). In many cases, the french translation was already
in place and did *not* include these errors. It would be very nice, if
the translators, especially the first ones (and the french tend to be
those) could also correct the original document in case of obvious
errors, and maybe(!) even improve the original, when phrasing is poor (by
opening bugs, talking to authors, ...). For example in the consultants
some texts are obviously written by non-english speakers.
The most striking case I found is consultants/et_computer.wml. The
original contained a phrase "F-skattebevis" which I had no idea what
it meant. I asked a swedish developer who explained it to me. So the
first thing I did was to update the original english file, as I am
sure, most english speaking people will have no idea what this means.
Before writing this email I checked, and saw that the file was
translated into french[1] almost two years ago, but the original was not
touched by the translator since then.
It would be very nice if the sophisticated french system ("you") could also
provide feedback to the original documents. This not only improves the
original documents, but makes life easier for later translation-teams.
And in fact, for you as well, because when, e.g., I find errors in the
original document, I improve the file. If I am not sure, that the
other translations are not impacted by this (most of the time they
arn't, but e.g. for the case cited above, I cannot update the other
languages) than you will need to do this for french - extra work at this
stage.
Thanks for listening and happy translation!
Greetings
Helge
[1] And, in fact, I like your solution so I just updated the original
once more similar to your way.
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de
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