On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 10:42:17AM +0200, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb: > >Selon Marc Haber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > >>Being a German native speaker, I write everything in English. > > Same here. > > >>Occasionaly, some other German native speaker decides to translate my > >>work to German. Being a native English speaker who speaks French/Spanish - I'm not surprised when translations into French/Spanish seem clumsy. I've tried to post technical French on the debian-french lists - I come over as (potentially) correct but very stilted and artificial. My French must seem _very_ odd to a French native speaker - as if I swallowed the dictionary and grammar books :) By the same token, I can spot when a non-native speaker has translated a technical document because it isn't quite idiomatic / reads more correctly in the original.
I have seen my own HOWTO translated into "foreign" - it is the hardest task in the world to produce good quality translation. I'm always impressed and surprised by the ease and facility with which Germans/French and others express themselves within these Anglophone lists on the Debian servers. > > In my case I could do myself. The reason to give a German translation > low priority are: The english original should be top quality first. The > package is addressed to admins. > > >>Usually, I am not impressed by the translations because they usually > >>feel clumsy and awkward to me, as if I were explaining the things to a > >>child. > > Keep it simple, is a good decision. But I think, I know what you mean. > > Hmm ... my experience is, that English is more straight ahead and > shorter than German. Having only basic knowledge of French, it seems > IMHO more complicated than German to express technical things. If your > French version is more professional, than the English one must be of > very bad quality. > Not bad quality, just "different". In translating a long English phrase, I've sometimes needed to use two French phrases, for example. > >Correct grammar, no familiarity > >(personalisation of the computer) and such are a real improvement, IMHO. > > Besides the usual checklist (grammar, spelling, unique style, short > sentences) the most important thing is wording consistancy. IMHO this > should be done in the original version first, and then issue a "ready to > translate" message. > > >>I'd like to know whether I am the only one who feels uncomfortable > >>with technical software in the native language. > It probably just looks a bit odd - if you spend 7 hours a day with technical English, technical <anything else> feels slightly odd :) If I spend 45 minutes reading French/Spanish, it takes a minute or two to come back to English :) > Using only English has a lot of advantages. Just paste an error message > to google and you will find a solution for the problem. > > But as you can see from translation activity, other people do not have > the same opinion, e.g. Brazilians or Japanese. There is a strong need > for translation, and this should be supported in the best way. > > >Erm. I can understand you don't personnaly want to use the translated > >version to > > your native language, but I do think that using a not translated > >system/software is simply not an option for some people. We have to do the best we can. It may be worth doing stuff even for 15-20,000 people (KDE localisation to Upper Sorbian, for example) if it feels right. > > ACK. The ideal solution is, that everybody can change the language at > runtime, e.g. via hotkey. Hard to implement, and overkill in most cases > - I know. ACK > > >So, the whole debate here seems to come down to whether we want to provide > >a > >system for hackers or for [lamda] users. > > Or if debian targets only to experts, or also to beginners. I vote for > the beginners. Nobody can be expert in everything. Just my 0.02 Euro :) Andy
