Re: Confusion of Applet and Capplet :)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> >> Okay...some of those names were a little silly....but I don't see much
> >> of a reason if they don't translate...I mean, there are plenty of
> >> made up terms everywhere and they aren't translated [shit, if only I
> >> could think of an example].
> 
> > You give a perfect reason why terminology should be picked so that it
> > translates well - because there is already too much invented nonsense
> > techno-babble that doesn't. There's no need to deliberately make that
> > situation worse.
> 
> > There are plenty of other reasons why terminology should be picked so
> > that it translates easily. Invented nonsense words like "Gizmo",
> > "Yokeys", "Thingameybobs", "Whizlets" and "Evilets" are particulary bad
> > examples. The reason is that they simply are nonsense words that give no
> > information about what they are in themselves. They are thus hard to
> > understand as terminology even by English users, and the situation just
> > gets worse when exporting the terminology to another language.
> 
> Of course, most of these words aren't "invented nonsense words".
> "Gizmo", "Thingamabob" and so on are in the dictionary. "Gizmo" dates to
> 1943, and "Thingamabob" dates to 1832. So they're not neologisms, or
> something that was just invented for our purpose.

Well, they are still invented... :)


> I can think of several ways to translate both these words into Norwegian
> (my own native language), and for what it's worth, I can think of a
> couple of candidates in Swedish and Danish too.

That's the problem. There are a zillion of other nonsense words in
languages that you can replace them with, and none of them really mean
anything or make any sense, and what's worse is that the relationship
between a native nonsense word and the English original would be diffuse
at best.
And that's a serious problem - users of translated environments wanting
to know the English term, so that they can ask for help on a mailing
list or the like, is not uncommon. We don't help them by using nonsense
"thingie" words that have no actual translation, are totally
undescriptive, and could as well have been picked randomly.


> Of course, there might not be any *exact* translations, but there rarely
> are.

On the contrary, there often are. Not in most cases, but in many.
Different levels of translation experience really can make huge
difference.

And there are no translations of these words at all - you can't
translate a nonsense word, the only thing you can do is either replace
it with other nonsense words in the language you're translating to.
Since nonsense words can mean basically anything, and every two
different people will disagree on what that is in a particular context,
and every two different people will naturally also disagree on what
nonsense it corresponds to in English, this causes problems.


> So, don't assume that words don't mean anything just because you don't
> know them. :)

I know what these words are. Basically anything. So they can be
translated to basically anything, and every possible translation would
be correct. Also, when you translate back, it can be basically anything
that way too, not necessarily the word you started with. So every
different person can have a valid opinionon what these words stands for
and what their translations are. And that's a serious problem
translation-wise.

Well, I wish you good luck if you want to convince every
English-speaking person on this planet that "gizmo" now precisely stands
for "GNOME panel thingie" from now on, and nothing else. I look forward
to seeing the budget proposal for the required marketing and
commericals. :-)


Christian