Re: terminology & translator management

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2003-07-02 klockan 19.22 skrev pclouds:
> > > I would like to have a
> > > place for translators to discuss about terms and use only one of them.
> > > Is there a program to do that?
> > 
> > I think the translation teams' own mailing lists are commonly used for
> > such discussions. That's at least the case for Swedish, and I know it's
> > true for some other teams too.
> > When there is a consensus in the discussion, the resulting
> > recommendation is then put up on a glossary that we have on our web page
> > for the Swedish team.
> 
> Beside gnome-dependent terms, there are many Linux terms (and general
> computer terms), which need to be translated. For example, "File" is
> currently translated to "Tap tin" or "Tep" in Vietnamese. Different
> teams (mainly KDE and GNOME team) translate in different
> ways. Gnome-dependent terms can be discussed on our mailing list, but
> other terms should be discussed on another place, where more people
> can give an advice, not only translators.

True. I think we're spoiled that way with Swedish (and again, this is
also true for some other languages) since we have a thing which is in
Sweden called "Datatermgruppen", which is an independant committee,
consisting of linguists, translators and computer journalists, that
gives recommendations for the translation of common computer terms into
Swedish. While they are only recommendations, they do at the same time
have a lot of influence, as most of the recommendations are followed by
existing translations of Windows and MacOS for example, and after a
while also find their way into ordinary Swedish dictionaries.

So there's not much to discuss about the translation into Swedish of the
most common computer terminology. We can focus on the terminology that's
special to the UNIX/free software world, and also specialized fields
(like graphics or financial applications, where Janne is doing a
tremendous amount of work digging through Swedish Photoshop and Excel
manuals and even consulting experts in the fields when necessary).


> Such place should rather be
> a web site than a list, it is like a discussion board.

Yes, perhaps some kind of Bugzilla setup would meet the requirements
(perhaps Bugzilla would be overkill, but you get the idea)? Then a
translator can file a bug report when something is unclear how it should
be translated, you can all give comments, and the problem can be
resolved and the final recommendation be put in an online glossary. And
it's easy to link to the relevant discussions for more background
information about a particular recommendation, since one would only have
to link to the bug report. In any case, it's an idea.


> We discussed about some terms in the past. People didn't find out the
> best solution, then stopped discussing. People continued
> translating. Then someone asked about the terms. We started again,
> like the former, and finally stopped without luck. I think we need a
> system to make a conclusion about what we discussed before. It is
> better than search entire mailing lists.
> 
> How do your team cooperate with other teams (e.g. KDE team)?

Unfortunately, we have no cooperation at all with the Swedish KDE team.
We've tried to contact them on several occasions in the past but so far
have not even recieved a response. It's a sad state of affairs, but
there's not much more we can do about it.

The cooperation with the Swedish team in the Translation Project is much
better; we share the same mailing list for terminology discussions and
all Swedish GNOME team members are in fact also TP translators AFAIK, so
there's a lot of cooperation there.


Christian