Re: Terminology translation

[Christian Meyer <chrisime uni de>]

> 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. :)


[snip]


> 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.


I really hate those, too. Sometimes i have to guess what a abbreviation 
means. This causes big head-aches!



[snip]

> 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.


Yeah, in German this also leads to very long unreadable words:
GNOME-Anwendungsstart-Panel-Applet. As you can see we even have to add 
dashes. This looks very ugly and people might even think we're an alien 
race ;-)

Especially Nautilus has such long words:

Nautilus content loser component's factory

--> Nautilus-Inhaltsverlierer-Komponenten-Fabrik
Just look at that! I think you can imagine how users will start 
crying/laughing.
We tried to manage to split up those words. But for the most part this 
is almost impossible or results in even longer names.

For the future it'd be very kind of you to think about more simple words.

It's not only in our interest but also in the user's.

Regards,
Christian Meyer