Re: Unifying name for Plugins/Extensions/etc.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 08:11 +0100, Matteo Settenvini wrote:
> On mer, 2007-12-19 at 17:33 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 17:37 -0500, Andrew Conkling wrote:
> > > 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Since plugin and extension are effectively synonomous,
> > what's to stop the Italian translators for using their
> > "extension" word for "plugin"?
> > 
> > (I'm not trying to oppose the use of "extension", but
> > this particular argument just doesn't make much sense
> > to me.)
> 
> Not much; we could do that (even if it wouldn't be a good translation,
> since plug-ins and extensions may indicate the same thing, but they're
> NOT synonymous in a grammatical sense, as Callum pointed out).

They are not perfectly synonymous, I agree.  But they are
sufficiently synonymous for people to propose changing all
occurrences of plugin to extension.  If their meanings are
similar enough to do a global search and replace, I'd say
their meanings are similar enough to translate them to the
same word.

> However, the problem is having a consistent translation for plugins
> across the desktop. If you name that "extensions", translators will
> write it in italian as "estensioni".
> 
> If you leave that plugins, Italian translators could write that as (at
> least):
> 	* plugin (untranslated)
> 	* estensioni
> 	* ampliamenti
> 	* moduli
> 	* aggiunte
> 	* spine (here I'm joking :-))
> 
> So it isn't guaranteed that everyone will use the same term as the
> other, since "plugins" does not have a clear correspondence in it_IT.
> 
> Not counting the problem of going on the Internet for finding the
> solution to a problem, finding a tutorial in English wich refers to
> "plugins", and figuring out that is the same of "estensioni" in your
> Italian-translated UI. Whereas "extensions" is much more similar.
> 
> Anyway, nothing does stop us. Here the problem is with consistency
> across the desktop.

I understand this, but surely there are many terms we use
that have more than one obvious translation.  Translation
teams ought to have their own terminology recommendations,
similar to the English terminology guidelines we have in
the Documentation Style Guide.  (And, I believe, many of
the translation teams do have this.)

--
Shaun