Re: Promoting greater integration between developers/writers/I18N :)

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2003-06-26 klockan 13.52 skrev Mark McLoughlin:
> 	Trivial problems should be logged altogether in a single bug, harder
> problems should have individual bugs.
> 
> 	One problem I have as a maintainer is who should I take as having the
> final word on such things e.g. if some piece of terminology is changed
> in a UI review, a translator suggests that some other terminology is
> better and then a writer comes along with a different suggestion. In
> that case, I don't want to have decide myself - I'd like to be able to
> cc a single person or alias and say "You guys decide". Who should I cc ?

The GNOME Word List
(http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/wordlist.html),
maintained by GDP people as part of their GDSG, is already the reference
and authoritative source for terminology guidelines, both for docs and
UI. The HIG links to it as the reference for terminology, and we also
link to it from the I18N developer guidelines as the reference for
terminology.

The word list maintainers already take a great deal of effort to make
sure the recommended terminology is understandable by a wide audience.
So there should hardly be any question of what terminology to use as
long as it's listed in the word list. If it's not, the word list
maintainers take suggestions, I've heard. :-)

So there really shouldn't be a problem with translators, UI reviewers
and doc writers recommending different terminology. The only issue that
I can think of where the word list may not solve all terminology
problems for translation is in the case of missing context due to
lingustic reasons -- i.e. "Profile" (noun) and "Profile" (verb) may both
be possibly entirely valid recommendations in a word list, but if they
are used together in a po file in both contexts then severe problems
arise. Another example is language names and adjectives, i.e. "Russian"
(language) and "Russian" (adjective, for example about a keyboard layout
or encoding), which cause problems in Swedish at least.
But such things should be possible to solve be extending the tools to
add context where necessary
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97556), and not necessarily
by having to change the recommended terminology to accomodate for such
issues.

If there is a general disagreement from translators/UI reviewers/doc
writers, then perhaps it's because not enough people know about the word
list, and as a consequence try to develop their own recommendations and
suggestions. I don't know how to solve that. Perhaps making the word
list available seperately from the GDSG would make it easier to find and
use. Perhaps also an easily searchable database solution would help in
quickly finding the relevant recommendations related to a specific
issue, much like a real online dictionary. I sometimes find it tedious
myself to have to search several different pages of text to just find
the recommendations for folder/directory, for example. That's just wild
ideas, however...


Christian