Re: French translation

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Callum McKenzie wrote:

> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:30:33 +1300
> From: Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>
> To: heretik tuxfamily org
> Cc: games-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: French translation
>
> On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 23:50 +0100, Heretik wrote:
> > I just submitted the first half of the french translation of the rules.
> Great.
>
> > Some original rules files were horribly formatted, so i cleaned then
> > too, to make them more uniform and cute, to ease the work of other
> > translators. I hope it's ok.

> That is just fine, the documentation for individual games hasn't
> received much attention recently.
>
> > - Must i translate "GNOME Documentation Project" ?
> I don't know what the official policy is, I'd have said yes, but look in
> the documentation and translation parts of the GNOME web site.

The documentation project has an excellent style guide and all developers
and anyone who write about Gnome would do well to read it.  Of things
developers should read I'd consider it second only to the Human Interface
Guidelines but it likely to be of interest to a much wider audience.

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/

> > - Must i translate the license ? It raises some legal problems, as i'm
> > not a lawyer, i couldn't translate it accurately enough. Is there
> > already an accurate french translation of this whole thing ?
> My memory is that the English version is considered definitive.

As I mentioned offlist I was pretty sure that in most cases legal
contracts need to be given a primary language and although there are
unofficial translations of the GPL they are not legally definitive.
There is more explanation (in French) on the GNU web pages
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.fr.html#GPL

Your best bet would probably be to provide a link to an unofficial
translation and mention that the definative English version is available
in the LICENSE file.

It comes up a fair bit in Ireland because officially we are bilingual and
all state documents must be bilingual but the definative version is always
the Irish version, even though the Irish version was not necessarily the
original.  Weird, I know!.

> > - Why is freecell independent from aisleriot in the game menu ?
> There used to be a separate program that implemented freecell. The menu
> entry was to minimise the change-over hassles.

I'd expect a lot (and I mean a whole lot) of windows users would be
expecting to see Freecell and it make it simpler for them to find it.
Freecell is allegedly the most played computer game ever.

> > - What does aisleriot mean ? Where does this name come from ?

> It is an anagram of solitaire.

Also (and this was very likely intentional) it sounds like real
words "ailse" meaning a type of walkway and "riot" which I expect you
already know means a great big fight.

The way I pronounce "aisle" it sounds a lot like "I'll" which is short for
"I will" which makes Ailseriot sound like a rather dangerous name.

On my RedHat Fedora Core 3 machine the menu item reads Aisleriot Solitare,
so I tend not to think about it and ignore it like a brand name.

- Alan