Terminology translation

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Just replying to a many months old mail that I found while digging
through old unread mail.

colin z robertson wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 11:47:03AM +0100, Mike Newman wrote:
> > On 17 Apr 2001 11:22:30 +0100, colin z robertson wrote:
> >
> > > > True enough - is there perhaps a neutral term which translates well
> > > > which could strike a balance between the two?
> > >
> > > There's always "options". To my mind that doesn't have any
> > > connotations either way.
> >
> > I like "options" too, but this is really one for the i18n people to
> > think about perhaps?
> 
> Well, except that we need an English word as well, and I think I'm
> qualified for that at least.
> 
> Which raises the question, how does l10n work at the moment? I mean,
> here we are having a big discussion about quite subtle points of
> terminology. Is the same process going on with the translators? I took
> a brief look at the gnome-i18n-list archives the other day and got the
> impression that it was more likely to be just one person working alone
> on the translations.

I can assure that the same process is going on with the translators. The
reason that you are not seeing much terminology-related discussions on
gnome-i18n gnome org is that this list is mainly for discussions that
affect all GNOME translators, while terminology translation usually is
language-dependant and thus usually happens on the forums of the
individual language teams.

The GNOME Translation Project is divided into ~ 40 different language
teams that translate GNOME applications into "their" language. Each
language team is at least one person, and I believe the really big ones
are about 4 - 8 or something like that. Nevertheless, I can assure you
that there is more than one GNOME translator, even if we usually aren't
very visible. :)

Regarding the terminology discussions themselves... I can only speak for
the Swedish team, but we have a quite active mailing list (~ 5 - 40
mails a day, yesterday was 55 mails) with Swedish translators from many
different projects, where we submit translations for review by others
and have terminology discussions.
It can be rather lengthy discussions, and in general, I think deciding
on terminology translation usually is even more complex than deciding on
terminology in English.

Translation of terminology into a particular language does not just
affect usability issues like metaphors, consistency, what words are used
in other environments and the like, but also translation issues like: is
this a good metaphor in this culture, does the word already have a
translation (searching in several sources and fields, not just computers
and technology), if there is no one-to-one mapping then does the
suggested translation interfere with other translated terminology, is
the translation too long to be usable, if it does not have a translation
then what words are similar and have a translation, if there are no
similar words then can it be rewritten and be based on multiple other
words, if that does not work then can it be borrowed as-is but spelled
out in that language, but many times there is also the (highly
subjective) issue "is this English word already widely used in this
language and would it make sense to try to translate it into something
that the users in this field, already familiar with the English word,
would not recognize or be familiar with".
The latter is not uncommon in highly technical fields, and is usually a
recipe for endless debate :) However, we are all civilized people and
usually end up agreeing on something that is then also put in our word
list for future reference. In the rare cases where we do not agree the
individual translator always has the final say about what he will put in
his translation.


In general, to do easily translatable terminology you first have to
adhere to general usability principles in English. The word should not
be an abbreviation (I consider even "regexp" to be an abbreviation),
slang, confusing, but rather self-explaining and unique. This is the
most important thing.

Also try to avoid dialect or overly complex language (just because a
word is in the Oxford English dictionary or used locally at your
location does not mean that it should be used :) - This is probably
self-explanatory from a usability standpoint but it really can cause
problems when translating. Not only is such language hard to translate
correctly and may cause problems for the international users, but it
also may confuse translators and makes accidental mistranslations
possible - remember that translators are rarely native English speakers,
and usually don't know much about English dialects and regional
language, or have a Masters degree in English from Oxford.
My favorite example of this is the word "Bozo" in Pan, which is all over
Pan but not explained anywhere. I had to contact a Pan developer to get
explained what it was and the history behind it.


So general rules apply. Most other problems when translating terminology
is specific to every language, and is thus hard to avoid. As an example,
a point that may be specific to translation into German and Scandinavian
languages is that multi-level composed terminology is very difficult to
translate. By this I mean terminology like:

	"GNOME application launch panel applet"

The reason is that in German and Scandinavian languages these will have
to be written together - words composed from multiple other words have
to be written together in these languages to be considered a single
word, as opposed to English where they can still be written with spaces
inbetween.
A word like the above would be terribly long and hardly pronouncable nor
readable if written together in its entirity (Swedish:
"GNOME-programstartarpanelprogram"), so what you usually end up doing is
rewriting ("GNOME panel applet for the launching of programs") which is
usually longer but on the other hand readable and pronouncable.


There are probably many more caveats when translating into other
languages, and probably impossible to pay attention to them all, so what
you in general have to do is just make it simple, self-explanatory and
unique in English.


Christian