Re: Non-community-based approaches to localisation

[Shrikant Jamadagni <shrikantaj yahoo co in>]

hi!

It is wonderful that localisation is happening in so many languages but all of the technical words are not 'roodha' because unfortunately nobody speaks technical stuff in mother-tongue. Thus it is difficult to decide which word sounds better in translation. So it important to spread actual usage also of localised UI. Later words may be altered wherever neccessary.

Re: Hindi - I have not seen GNOME Hindi translation but have looked at some in KDE. I see very little attempt to coin Hindi words. English words have been merely spelt in devanagari. Borrowing is one thing but to be completely overwhelmed by another language is quite another. 'Borrowing' at this rate changes 'Hindi' into another language altogether. 
No offense meant to the translator. 

BTW - I have looked at Hindi Glossary of computer terms from CDAC. it is not very impressive i think.

Shrikant Jamadagni

Bangalore

--- On Wed, 3/9/08, Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net> wrote:
From: Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net>
Subject: Non-community-based approaches to localisation
To: gnome-i18n gnome org
Cc: "Indian Linux group ," <indlinux-group lists sourceforge net>
Date: Wednesday, 3 September, 2008, 1:10 PM

Hi,
  The GNOME localisation community in India is faced
with a very peculiar situation, and it would be good
to arrive at a consensus on how to deal with this.

  The BossLinux (http://bosslinux.in/) folk based at
CDAC-Chennai have gone ahead, and translated large
parts of GNOME (I believe version 2.18) into 18
Indian languages. These are available at 
http://downloads.bosslinux.in/Translated_Po_files/
I applaud the scale of this effort, but unfortunately
there are some serious drawbacks here that make it
difficult, if not impossible for this work to be
integrated into GNOME:
1. I know of no attempt to contact existing language
   teams prior to starting on this work. This is true
   at least of Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Oriya.
   Worse yet, the language team line in the .po file
   header has been changed to some CDAC address, which
   can only lead to myriad problems down the road.
2. As CDAC made no attempt to talk to people about
   consistency, the translation terms used are out
   of sync with accepted ones that were used earlier.
   At least for Hindi, and now increasingly for other
   language, the terms that the FOSS community uses
   are reviewed by outsiders.
3. The translation quality is low, at least in the
   Oriya .po files that I saw. For example, "parent"
   as in "parent process" has been translated into
   the equivalent of "biological parent".
4. CDAC has offered these files up for the community
   to submit upstream, but has apparently no intentions
   of being involved in the process.