Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On 16/08/2006, at 4:56 AM, Steve Langasek wrote: On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 01:19:29PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be variants in some use. As a linguist, I and 200 million of my native English-speaking brethren Steve, I am a native speaker of English, and I lecture in English. Otherwise I would not make recommendations on English. That's fine, according to wikipedia I left you several hundred other million native English speakers that you can use for other arbitrary appeals to authority if you'd like. :) I'm making a recommendation based on my qualifications and experience. I think that's a reasonable thing to do. reject your claim of authority over what constitutes the correct spelling of a loan word whose source form includes diacritics not present in standard English. According to the dictionary you quoted, voila is only a variant of the primary form voilà. Primary forms are preferred over variants. If they were universally preferred, the variants would not exist. Your claim was that the primary form was correct, and the others are incorrect; I think this is presumptuous and unsupported by common usage. Primary forms are preferred over variants because they are recognized as the majority usage. or not using it at all. Which would be a fair recommendation, but such an interdiction doesn't carry much weight if you don't have consensus on the question of what is or isn't an acceptably correct form. I'm agreeing with your dictionary quotation. No, you're claiming that variant spellings are wrong. I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone claim a word's presence in a dictionary is *evidence* that it's incorrect... The dictionary states that voilà is the primary form. I support this. It would only waste time if we compared different dictonaries and got into research papers. Yes, it would. Quite frankly, I consider that the translators' problem, not the maintainers'. It is quite reasonable to constrain source English strings with style rules concerning consistent use of vocab, forms of address, and UI references because these are rules that benefit the primary audience of the string: the user. Subsetting the language for the benefit of translators, OTOH, is a misoptimization which impoverishes the user experience and deprives the translators themselves of opportunities for enrichment. I don't think making translators look up variants of loan words is useful. In my experience of translation projects, loan words in general are often misunderstood, causing an incorrect translation. The GNOME developer's choice to spell né as ne confused nearly all the translators, and wasn't recognized even by the French translators. Er, this isn't at all analogous. The *feminine* form née/nee exists in English, because it's used to denote the maiden name of married women -- since there is no tradition in the English speaking world of men changing their surnames, there is no corresponding masculine form in common use. This makes ne a misspelling (of either the English or the French, take your pick), not a variant, whereas it's easy to find nee with or without accent in an English dictionary. Oh, entertainingly, m-w.com does list né, but unlike for née and voilà, it doesn't recognize an accentless variant. shrug While I might get it into my own head to be clever enough to use a masculine form in English, I wouldn't rely on an English dictionary to support such a usage anyway. For that matter, I don't really care very much for m-w.com as a dictionary, but that's beside the point -- namely, that there is not Debian standard dictionary for English and you're not likely to get one when there are hundreds or thousands of native speakers involved in the project who each have their own local language preferences. Yes, we should avoid unrecognizable spellings that are incomprehensible to translators, but do you really think any translator is going to have trouble finding voila in a dictionary? Based on my experience, translators will find it confusing, and ignore it, resulting in an incorrect translation. I have seen this happen so often in translation files, that I take the time to recommend developers avoid using uncommon forms of words. Since you're dealing with people for whom English is not their native language, using the most common forms of language maximizes your chance you will be understood correctly, and thus translated correctly. I don't mind taking the time to put in a bug report, or to provide some additional information, but I don't have time to waste. I don't think you're listening to what I say. That's up to you. I have work to do. from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On Thursday 10 August 2006 15:31, Christian Perrier wrote: retitle 382341 Typos/errors in the installation guide thanks - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about changing it to hey presto! ;-) pgpyaft8XJFTR.pgp Description: PGP signature
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 01:19:29PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be variants in some use. As a linguist, I and 200 million of my native English-speaking brethren Steve, I am a native speaker of English, and I lecture in English. Otherwise I would not make recommendations on English. That's fine, according to wikipedia I left you several hundred other million native English speakers that you can use for other arbitrary appeals to authority if you'd like. :) reject your claim of authority over what constitutes the correct spelling of a loan word whose source form includes diacritics not present in standard English. According to the dictionary you quoted, voila is only a variant of the primary form voilà. Primary forms are preferred over variants. If they were universally preferred, the variants would not exist. Your claim was that the primary form was correct, and the others are incorrect; I think this is presumptuous and unsupported by common usage. or not using it at all. Which would be a fair recommendation, but such an interdiction doesn't carry much weight if you don't have consensus on the question of what is or isn't an acceptably correct form. I'm agreeing with your dictionary quotation. No, you're claiming that variant spellings are wrong. I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone claim a word's presence in a dictionary is *evidence* that it's incorrect... It would only waste time if we compared different dictonaries and got into research papers. Yes, it would. Quite frankly, I consider that the translators' problem, not the maintainers'. It is quite reasonable to constrain source English strings with style rules concerning consistent use of vocab, forms of address, and UI references because these are rules that benefit the primary audience of the string: the user. Subsetting the language for the benefit of translators, OTOH, is a misoptimization which impoverishes the user experience and deprives the translators themselves of opportunities for enrichment. I don't think making translators look up variants of loan words is useful. In my experience of translation projects, loan words in general are often misunderstood, causing an incorrect translation. The GNOME developer's choice to spell né as ne confused nearly all the translators, and wasn't recognized even by the French translators. Er, this isn't at all analogous. The *feminine* form née/nee exists in English, because it's used to denote the maiden name of married women -- since there is no tradition in the English speaking world of men changing their surnames, there is no corresponding masculine form in common use. This makes ne a misspelling (of either the English or the French, take your pick), not a variant, whereas it's easy to find nee with or without accent in an English dictionary. Oh, entertainingly, m-w.com does list né, but unlike for née and voilà, it doesn't recognize an accentless variant. shrug While I might get it into my own head to be clever enough to use a masculine form in English, I wouldn't rely on an English dictionary to support such a usage anyway. For that matter, I don't really care very much for m-w.com as a dictionary, but that's beside the point -- namely, that there is not Debian standard dictionary for English and you're not likely to get one when there are hundreds or thousands of native speakers involved in the project who each have their own local language preferences. Yes, we should avoid unrecognizable spellings that are incomprehensible to translators, but do you really think any translator is going to have trouble finding voila in a dictionary? -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On 13/08/2006, at 4:43 AM, Steve Langasek wrote: On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 02:29:06PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: retitle 382341 Typos/errors in the installation guide thanks - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about a recommendation not to use words from another language unless you can write them properly? http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=voila Given that such words can be found in English dictionaries, that's not a very useful recommendation. As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be variants in some use. I'd still strongly advise either using the correctly-spelt form of the word, or not using it at all. Translators are not expecting incorrect forms in the original strings. We have enough difficulty with the wild variety of vocabulary and syntax used in original strings, without having to cope with incorrect forms of loan words (entire words borrowed from another language). from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 04:12:15PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: On 13/08/2006, at 4:43 AM, Steve Langasek wrote: - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about a recommendation not to use words from another language unless you can write them properly? http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=voila Given that such words can be found in English dictionaries, that's not a very useful recommendation. As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be variants in some use. As a linguist, I and 200 million of my native English-speaking brethren reject your claim of authority over what constitutes the correct spelling of a loan word whose source form includes diacritics not present in standard English. I'd still strongly advise either using the correctly-spelt form of the word, I disagree; I think we should only use correctly-spelled forms of words. I accept voila as a valid variant of voilà in English; moreover, it's the only spelling of the word which is guaranteed to be compatible with .po files for all destination languages due to encoding concerns. or not using it at all. Which would be a fair recommendation, but such an interdiction doesn't carry much weight if you don't have consensus on the question of what is or isn't an acceptably correct form. Translators are not expecting incorrect forms in the original strings. We have enough difficulty with the wild variety of vocabulary and syntax used in original strings, without having to cope with incorrect forms of loan words (entire words borrowed from another language). Quite frankly, I consider that the translators' problem, not the maintainers'. It is quite reasonable to constrain source English strings with style rules concerning consistent use of vocab, forms of address, and UI references because these are rules that benefit the primary audience of the string: the user. Subsetting the language for the benefit of translators, OTOH, is a misoptimization which impoverishes the user experience and deprives the translators themselves of opportunities for enrichment. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On 13/08/2006, at 5:29 PM, Steve Langasek wrote: On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 04:12:15PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: On 13/08/2006, at 4:43 AM, Steve Langasek wrote: - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about a recommendation not to use words from another language unless you can write them properly? http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=voila Given that such words can be found in English dictionaries, that's not a very useful recommendation. As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be variants in some use. As a linguist, I and 200 million of my native English-speaking brethren Steve, I am a native speaker of English, and I lecture in English. Otherwise I would not make recommendations on English. reject your claim of authority over what constitutes the correct spelling of a loan word whose source form includes diacritics not present in standard English. According to the dictionary you quoted, voila is only a variant of the primary form voilà. Primary forms are preferred over variants. I'd still strongly advise either using the correctly-spelt form of the word, I disagree; I think we should only use correctly-spelled forms of words. I accept voila as a valid variant of voilà in English; moreover, it's the only spelling of the word which is guaranteed to be compatible with .po files for all destination languages due to encoding concerns. or not using it at all. Which would be a fair recommendation, but such an interdiction doesn't carry much weight if you don't have consensus on the question of what is or isn't an acceptably correct form. I'm agreeing with your dictionary quotation. It would only waste time if we compared different dictonaries and got into research papers. Consensus on language is a moving target. ;) Translators are not expecting incorrect forms in the original strings. We have enough difficulty with the wild variety of vocabulary and syntax used in original strings, without having to cope with incorrect forms of loan words (entire words borrowed from another language). Quite frankly, I consider that the translators' problem, not the maintainers'. It is quite reasonable to constrain source English strings with style rules concerning consistent use of vocab, forms of address, and UI references because these are rules that benefit the primary audience of the string: the user. Subsetting the language for the benefit of translators, OTOH, is a misoptimization which impoverishes the user experience and deprives the translators themselves of opportunities for enrichment. I don't think making translators look up variants of loan words is useful. In my experience of translation projects, loan words in general are often misunderstood, causing an incorrect translation. The GNOME developer's choice to spell né as ne confused nearly all the translators, and wasn't recognized even by the French translators. from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 02:29:06PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: retitle 382341 Typos/errors in the installation guide thanks - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about a recommendation not to use words from another language unless you can write them properly? http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=voila Given that such words can be found in English dictionaries, that's not a very useful recommendation. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
retitle 382341 Typos/errors in the installation guide thanks - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
On 10/08/2006, at 11:01 PM, Christian Perrier wrote: retitle 382341 Typos/errors in the installation guide thanks - voila + voilà Using non-ASCII in the original English version is likely to create some problems with PO files handling, os I'd recommend changing this with caution even if it's certainly correct as the English speakers have stolen that word from my language..:-) How about a recommendation not to use words from another language unless you can write them properly? It confuses the users. We had a bug at Gnome, where a developer had written the string: msgid new_program_name (ne old_program_name) and even the French translators didn't recognize what he meant, because the accent was missing. (Then we got into a fun discussion on the gender of software... ;) ) from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN PGP.sig Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Bug#382341: INTL:vi
Package: installation-guide Version: Severity: minor Tags: l10n using-d-i.po ___ 1. po:169 auto: ⑤ Tag: para Original: ⌘0 Now when you realize you need more space for your old 160GB filename/home/ filename partition, you can simply add a new 300GB disk to the computer, join it with your existing volume group and then resize the logical volume which holds your filename/home/filename filesystem and voila mdash; your users have some room again on their renewed 460GB partition. This example is of course a bit oversimplified. If you haven't read it yet, you should consult the ulink url=\url-lvm-howto;\LVM HOWTO/ulink. - voila + voilà 2. po:181 auto: ⑤ Tag: para Original: ⌘0 You can also use this menu to delete an existing LVM configuration from your hard disk before choosing quoteGuided partitioning using LVM/quote. Guided partitioning using LVM is not possible if there already are volume groups defined, but by removing them you can get a clean start. quoteGuided partitioning using LVM/quote does not exist in the Level 1 .po file. There is an item containing Guided partitioning only. Clytie Siddall (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
