On 29.07.2021 17:44, Bret Johnson wrote:
> While it should be relatively easy to write this output in another
Indeed, looks like fairly doable :)
> language, the options themselves are mnemonic to make it easier to
> remember them (which is why I have some words capitalized in the
> descriptions). If this were to be converted to another language, the> ASCII
> codes for the options should probably change also (for example,
> the /F option for FormFeed should maybe change to something other than F
> in Turkish -- I really have no idea). This in brings up "coordination"
> issues since you can't duplicate letters in the options. None of this
> is impossible to overcome, but it gets confusing and messy in a hurry
> and makes things very difficult to maintain and test.
Current translations for other FreeDOS programs do not touch option
letters. The goal is to make the program usable by people who do not
speak English, but sure, it won't be as intuitive as in English.
You can compare and get a glimpse of how translations would look like
with regard to options on
<http://www.bootablecd.de/FreeDOS-Internet-version/help/index.htm>.
Interestingly, in the 80s there were several attempts to create versions
of BASIC with commands translated to French. It never really took off,
people preferred the original versions. On Turkish QWERTY keyboards (as
opposed to the F layout optimized for Turkish and used by like 5% of the
market), Caps Lock, Prt Scr, Scroll Lock, Num Lock, Home, End, Pause and
other similar keys aren't even translated, and that doesn't seem to
bother most people. Also, I recently offered my Commodore 64 with all
the peripherals and programming books (in Turkish) to a friend. He
doesn't speak a word of English, but managed to draw a world map on it
in BASIC, recreating a program he had written when he was a kid. What
I'm trying to say with these examples is that people can adapt and
options or commands in English are not that much of a hurdle.
So leaving the option letters as they are may be less of a problem than
you think. And more people could use the software.
> *****
>
> In addition, in PRTSCR (and most of my other programs) I have long-form
> aliases for the command line options. The following is a partial output
> from PRTSCR which shows the aliases for the various options. The very
> first one in the list shows the aliases for the /? (Help) option which
> are H, Hlp, and Help. So, for example, instead of typing "PRTSCR /?"
> you can type "PRTSCR /Help" and get the same output.
>
> Anyway, converting this to another language would bring up all kinds of
> issues related to aliases (including coming up with "good" Aliases) and
> single-letter options and such. That's and involved and complicated
> process that involves much more than simple translation. It's certainly
> possible, but not exactly trivial.
There's a saying in French, something like "The best is the enemy of
good". While everything won't be as good as in the original version in
English when it comes to mnemonics, at least the programs will be usable
by more people. And we're talking about people who are not afraid of
editing config files at least, so I'd say let's do it.
> *****
>
> THe last major item is documentation, which in my case is PRTSCR.DOC.
> This is currently a 60+ page document which would need to be completely
> translated to all the other languages. BTW, I currently write the>
> documentation using WordPerfect for DOS and have it "print" to a text
> file, though it doesn't necessarily need to stay that way.
60 pages? Ouch. I translated the HTML help of FreeDOS in French, so I
have a rough idea of what that could mean. I'd say let's start with the
program and its built-in help, then we can see for the documentation
(I'd obviously need more time but we aren't in a hurry, are we? :)
> Anyway, volunteering to "properly" translate even a simple program like
> PRTSCR is far from trivial and would probably require some
> back-and-forth interaction instead of operating independently.
I translate. You compile and package. I check your version and fix my
typos and mistakes. Then you recompile ;)
> Are you willing to make that level of commitment, and to do it for a lot
> of different programs (including some that are MUCH more complicated
> than PRTSCR)?
I'd say let's start with PRTSCR and see how it goes. If you're satisfied
with the result, we can continue with other programs. I will just ask
for one week before starting the work as I really need to get back to
working on Blocek's translations.
> And, is it really worth the effort (considering this is an archaic thing
> like DOS)?
I had used DOS back in the day when I was in a student dormitory. Then I
bought an HP laptop in 2016 which came with FreeDOS to avoid the Windows
tax. Hence my renewed interest: it's still around (and I learned a lot
of stuff when I translated the HTML Help). So yes, I think it's worth
it, and I'm going to learn new stuff too :-)
Feel free to ping me off-list with whatever I have to do to get started.
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