Re: About pt_BR and pt_PT translations
>>>>> "faw" == Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw)" <felipe@cathedrallabs.org> writes:
faw> On 10/25/2005 10:11 PM, Miguel Figueiredo wrote:
>> Portuguese as spoken/written in Portugal do share some small
>> but undeniable differences. Of course I understand (>90%)
>> Portuguese from Brazil but to be honest it doesn't sounds
>> correct to me. I believe the other way, the feeling it's the
>> same. It's not an historical/colonial/whatever issue.
faw> Indeed. I have to tell that as we have a
faw> social/cultural problem with lots of people facing a hard
faw> time to go to school and considering that we have lots of
faw> social projects using Debian to allow these people to study
faw> and also to get in touch with Information Society, the use of
faw> non-common Brazilian words (used by Portugal, like "ecra")
faw> brings one more step to them.
Excuse me for barging in, but I live in Japan, and am lucky enough to
know many Brazilian Japanese, guest workers here and their families.
One difficulty they have is that their Japanese is slightly different
from standard Japanese, especially with respect to borrowings. In
fact this becomes very obvious with computers---the Brazilians often
borrow from Portuguese, standard Japanese from US English. While I
hope that Portuguese speakers are more open-minded than the Japanese
are, it is true that stories of discrimination in employment and higher
education based on small linguistic differences are common here.
While this is far from ideal, it is real. So in our global economy
the process of education it is of great benefit to use a _common_
vocabulary, especially when the terms are being taught for the first
time anyway.
>> I see having these 2 variations not a loss for the users nor
>> for the Debian Project. In my opinion i see that as an quality
>> achievement in the way users can get the translation they
>> understand better (or even totally) and feel more comfortable.
faw> That's exactly what I'm trying to show. Thanks to put
faw> it in simple and direct words. :o)
There are different kinds of users, though. Naive users of course
learn best if familiar concepts are presented in familiar words, and
only the new ideas bring new words. And in urgent situations it's
best if the error message is presented in words that they can compare
to everyday life if they don't know the exact technical definition.
But professionals cooperating with each other are served best if they
all learn the _same_ words from the very beginning, and don't have to
learn new jargon every time they correspond with a new person.[1]
I hope that the two teams work together to serve _both_ needs by
identifying vocabulary/contexts where naive users would be best served
by having dialect-specific translations, and vocabulary/contexts where
having a common compromise translation would serve
internationalization in a broad social sense, helping people of
similar, but different, cultures to work together without unnecessary
friction.
faw> And we can work together. pt team can pull pt_BR
faw> translations and just do a review and vice-versa. We could
faw> even write some scripts to try to get it in an automatic way.
This might be all that is needed to accomplish my suggestion. That,
and a little bit of laziness to _not_ fix Portugal-origin translations
that sound only a little bit odd to Brazilian ears, and vice versa.
Adjust laziness until fit is good. :-)
Anyway, we should have fun! The Linux kernel supports Star Trek's
"Klingon" and IIRC the "runes" of JRR Tolkien's "Middle Earth",
languages which never were and never will be, while Google supports
"Swedish Chef" and maybe other invented dialects as a joke.
Footnotes:
[1] I'm an economist, and am sometimes amused to hear my Japanese
colleagues drop into English to assure that the technical vocabulary
is shared. Since most professional economics research is published in
English, in many cases Japanese textbook writers must invent their own
terms. Often, one will choose a very literal translation of the
English _word_, while another will choose a common Japanese word that
exemplifies the _idea_ and give it a technical definition. But since
the _words_ are not standardized, you don't know whether someone is
speaking precisely or as an example, and people who study different
textbooks may not be able to communicate _precisely_ in their native
language!
--
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
ask what your business can "do for" free software.
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