live-manual translated into French
Hi guys,
I'm writing this e-mail in English in case you want to forward any
part or the whole of its contents to the debian-live mailing list. If
this is not the case, please feel free to continue the discussion in
French or whichever language is customary in this list. Please cc me
since I'm *not* subscribed to your list.
My name is Carlos Zuferri (aka chals) and I started contributing to
the debian-live project two years ago translating live-manual and
several man pages into Spanish, French and from last summer onward
into Catalan. I will provide links to the translations and their git
repos later on but first please let me explain you some of the
'special' characteristics of live-manual. I hope that this way you'll
understand much better some of the choices that I made.
1. Sorry for not getting in touch with you any sooner, you may argue
that since wheezy is about to be officially released, we are almost
out of time for a complete revision of the text. 100% agreed, however,
during the preparation of the final version to be released in wheezy,
there have been so many changes, I'm talking about hundreds of
commits, that it was really hard to decide when and how the
translations would be ready for a revision.
I also know that manuals are rated low priority in the world of
translations. I'm subscribed to some list and I know pretty well the
order of priorities, installer, debconf templates... and I also know
that you all might be busy updating last minute documentation for the
debian project. Congratulations for the great work you are doing. You
are rating very high in the stats:
http://www.debian.org/international/l10n/po-debconf/rank
I do not really know in depth about other projects within debian but I
think that the case of live-manual is one in a million in trying to
catch up to the changes in the code of live-build, it was constantly
updated, there were changes almost every week. Did I say 'hundreds of
commits'? I think so...
http://live.debian.net/gitweb/?p=live-manual.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/debian-next
2. I am *not* a native speaker, I started working on the French
translation because it was incomplete and unmaintained and even though
I revised it twice there might be some errors I wasn't able to spot. I
was hoping that some native speaker would show up to improve it,
correct errors and maintain it from now on and I was right. Two native
speakers have offered to help on the mailing list and I am very happy
about that.
Also, keep in mind these considerations:
2.1 A big part of the translation was done automatically, tweaking the
structure of the sentences and improving the vocabulary as much as
possible.
2.2 The style of live-manual is direct and straightforward. In the
beginning both the Catalan and Fench translation used a rather formal
style but it was self evident after some experience dealing with users
on irc that translations of live-manual should try to imitate the
original style as much as possible. I learn that from Ben Armstrong. A
simple example should suffice. If you write "You can do this..." users
will interpret that it is merely an optional feature. However if you
write "Do this to achieve that." there is less space left for
misinterpretations.
This is to say, in short, that there may be some inconsistencies in
the style since I'm changing/adapting the original rather formal style
of the original French translation into a more direct, straightforward
language addressed to the reader trying to really imitate as
accurately as possible the original English text.
2.3 One thing that will immensely shock you, without the shadow of a
doubt, is the translation of "build" for "construction". I know it is
not an optimal choice of words, but it was chosen to match as
accurately as possible the idea of "building a live system with
live-build". I hope you understand that. Anyway it can be changed at
any time.
3. I tend to make very, very long explanations in my e-mails because
I like to put my message across, sorry about that. I think that is all
for now.
And again, as live-manual (unlike the more static man pages) is
continually changing the toughest part is keeping it up to date. If
anyone of you is interested in contributing maintainig the translation
or making suggestions or changes feel free to to so. But please, do
not push any changes to live-manual's git until next month since there
are two important processes in progress and it would be too bad to
interfere with the work of others as described in this thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-live/2013/01/msg00128.html
Other links that you may find of interest:
- Project's home page: http://live.debian.net/
- Mailing list: http://lists.debian.org/debian-live/
- Online version of live-manual: http://live.debian.net/manual/3.x/
- Git repository: http://live.debian.net/gitweb/
- Man pages (online version): http://live.debian.net/manpages/3.x/
Thank you very much for your attention, and sorry for the long e-mail.
Suggestions, critiques... extremely welcome.
Have a nice weekend :)
--
chals
www.chalsattack.com
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