I think you can, except the FSF requires that you place a notice, in English, saying 'This is an unofficial translation and the original English version is the only legal one', which obviously doesn't look very good on the program's copyright notice.
andrew On 1/16/06, Tobias Toedter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I searched the archives of -legal for anything similar to this, but could > not find anything. Excuse me if this has already been discussed, I would > then be grateful for a pointer. Also, please keep me CC'ed, as I'm not > subscribed to -legal. > > While translating a pot file into German, I found that the program prints > its license terms via gettext. Therefore, the license itself appears in the > list of translatable messages. > > Specifically, it uses the GPL with the following paragraphs: > > "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify\n" > "it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by\n" > "the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at\n" > "your option) any later version.\n" > "\n" > "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but\n" > "WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of\n" > "MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU\n" > "General Public License, /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL, for more details\n" > > My first thought was to look up the translation on www.gnu.org, and they > offer an unofficial translation of the GPL into German. I included the > corresponding two paragraphs and sent the file for reviewing to our German > translation coordination list. > > However, we could not decide whether translating a license is ok or not. We > tend to think that we should better *not* translate the paragraphs. > > Please note that there's still a pointer to the original license > (/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL) which is in English. The translation would > only apply to the informational text above, leaving the full license > intact. > > Would this already qualify as "re-licensing", which we obviously cannot do? > Or merely a help to better understand the terms and conditions? > > Cheers, > > -- > > Tobias > > Warning: Trespassers will be shot. > Survivors will be shot again. > > > -- Andrew Donnellan http://andrewdonnellan.com http://ajdlinux.blogspot.com Jabber - [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------- Member of Linux Australia - http://linux.org.au Debian user - http://debian.org Get free rewards - http://ezyrewards.com/?id=23484 OpenNIC user - http://www.opennic.unrated.net
