Re: terminology & translator management

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Hi Pablo,

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

> I mean, there is no real point in having per-projet separate translation
> teams; there should be a big coordination team per language, and then
> it could organize work as needed for translating various programs
> and projects.
> Don't see it as "team: Gnome, sub-team: vietnamese translation",
> but as "team: vietnamese translation, sub-team: Gnome".

Perhaps that's how it should work in an ideal situation, but reality is
not like this. For Dutch OSS translations there is a common shared mailing
list but KDE has its own team, as has GNOME, and Mandrake, etc. [1]

> Indeed a lot (nearly everything in fact) is common to any desktop
> (not only Gnome and KDE), the same concepts and words are used;

Well, just as KDE and GNOME use different interface design principles,
somtimes both translation teams choose to use different words for similar
concepts.  That is a fact of life but it doesn't make it easier for
"desktop neutral"  translations such as the Mandrake tools.

> in fact the same translation memory could (should) be shared

We'd have to get all translation programs to interface to the same TM
first. Not likely to happen anytime soon.

> But the general discussion could (should) involve people that aren't
> translating and don't even plan to translate anything; simple users,

Of course, but how do you reach those people and get them interested?

> lack of coordination in the translating itself, but a lack of common
> lexicon. Once a common wording is devised, then even without much
> coordination between translators, the texts are much more homogene

Since Kees van den Broek hasn't reacted yet, the GRUT tool he developed
can be useful to make translations consistent. See
http://www.kvdb.net/projects/grut/ .

[1] As you may recall I've been pushing to restructure the translation
effort for Mandrake, for mostly the same reasons that are mentioned in
this thread. It would be really great if we had per-language coordinators
and better status pages before the 9.2 rush!

regards,

-- 
Reinout van Schouwen			Artificial Intelligence student
email: reinout@cs.vu.nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778

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