Re: [gnome-cyr] Re: gtksourceview/po/ru.po: =?utf-8?b?0K3QudGH0KLQnNCb?=? WTF?

[danilo gnome org (=?utf-8?b?0JTQsNC90LjQu9C+?==?utf-8?b?INCo0LXQs9Cw0L0=?=)]

Hi Дмитрий,

Јуче у 6:54, Dmitry G. Mastrukov написа:
>> 
>> However, the most interesting one to me is HTTP (or is that НТТР/NTTR? :)
>> 
>> That puts the issue out in the open: if you don't go for
>> transcription, you lose out completely, because newcomers won't know a
>> thing you're talking about, and they even won't know how to read it or
>> call it (is that „н-т-т-р“ or „ејч-ти-ти-ар“).  I.e. they can't read
>> it, and they can't learn it.
>> 
> Yes, it's a key point. Newcomers (or any other people) don't have to
> know anything than their native language and alphabet.

I agree with your point.  But I was aiming at *others* who disagree,
and I was aiming at them with extremely practical point that even if
they *did* know the Latin alphabet, there's no way for them to know how
to read HTTP if they don't already know about it and what it
represents.  So, Дмитрий, this is not really a message aimed at you,
but those who think we should adopt English abbreviations as-is (I
simply cannot but think of KGB, pronounced кеј-джи-би [not even
remotely similar to original KGB] — English takes care of itself, and
Russian/Serbian/whatever doesn't?  — my friend gave me this nice and
familiar example).

I'm talking about glyphs looking the same.  HTTP looks exactly the
same as НТТР (eg. „Нови Труд Твоје Русије“ :).  Not many programs
provide features such as M-x describe-char Emacs does, which might be
used to differentiate between the two.

Just ask a 10-year old kid to *read* this: „C++“ or „Язык C“.  Ok,
everybody who is aware of „C programming language“ (C as in „see“)
won't have a problem here, but this will introduce a lot of problems
for everybody using a translation.

If you were writing introductory book for C, you would inevitably
have to write a couple paragraphs explaining that what everybody
thinks of as С (S, as in „Слово“) is actually „See“ or „Си“.  To make
matters more interesting, we (in Serbia) are actually reading that as
„це“ (tseh, with silent „h“), because we have used Latin alphabet
ourselves.

Serbian even uses „С“ itself to mean „with“ („С њим“ — with him).
For instance, a sentence beginning like „With it we can write our
own programs“ would be „С њим можемо писати своје програме“.  Every
reader of such introductory programming book would have to reread the
sentence if he already grew accustomed to C being in Latin alphabet.
These are cognitive patterns, and that makes using mixture of Latin
and Cyrillic alphabet a nightmare for anything apart from
dictionaries :)  I can imagine there are similar examples for Russian.

The simple proof of all this is ТеХ itself.  How many times did you
see it called „текс“?  I saw it too many times.  How many times did
you see it written in Latin script even though the surrounding text
is Cyrillic?  I saw it too many times (for those who do not know, the
catch here is that TeX represents Greek Tau-Epsilon-Chi, which is
closer to Cyrillic ТеХ/teh, than to Latin-script „tex“).

So, if you want to cause misunderstandings, misinterpretations and
misnaming, you can go any of the paths (like Knuth has done with TeX,
using Greek alphabet with letters which look very much alike
Latin alphabet letters with different meaning and pronounciation).
But if you want to make your translation easily *unambiguous*, then
you won't mix Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

Cheers,
Данило