Re: gug-translation

[Markus Fleck <fleck informatik uni-bonn de>]

Christoph Begall wrote:
> I have started a translation of the GNOME Users Guide to German

Great!:-)

> 1. Is there anyone else trying to do this? Upto now I have only the
>    first chapter, which gives very much space for working together.

You may want to contact the German translators of the GNU translation
project; see the German-HOWTO, 12.2. You can also subscribe to their
mailing list de@li.org (mail majordomo@li.org, "subscribe de" in body).

> 4. What is the policy with translations? E.g. there is a lot of "you"
>    in the doc, which has two possible translations in German, a
>    more formal one and an informal. (I would like to use the more
>    informal, because that seems to be more in the spirit of GNOME,
>    but it may be regarded as not professional...)

For German, you should always use the formal translation ("Sie"),
and sometimes even the passive voice translation ("man"). NEVER
use "Du" unless in personal e-mail. It is considered rude to
address people with "Du" in manuals, and indeed makes the
manual seem improfessional. After all, a stated goal of the
GNOME project is to enable non-hackers to use UNIX/Linux,
and they are probably also the main audience for manuals.

You might also want to write to de@li.org and ask them for
their teminology/style guidelines.

> 4a.I use some words untranslated ("desktop") which is quite normal
>    in German today. Do I put them into special tags? (In HTML I used
>    to <em>-phasize them.)

It would be way too much effort (IMHO) to get *all* translators
to agree on this, and use the same mark-up. But nowadays it is
almost normal to use English words in a German text, so you
shouldn't really need to mark or even emphasize them.

You definitely shouldn't translate everything, like
"Datenstationsemulator" for "Terminal Emulator", which
IBM used in the German version of OS/2. There are also
many technical terms where finding good translations is
probably impossible, such as "pattern/string matching".
IMHO you can assume that people are technologically literate
enough to understand much of the original English jargon
(even though it might be useful to add short explanations
for seldom-used terms).

Keep going! :-)
- Markus.

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