This has been an interesting thread to watch from a process point of view. Good to see some convergence on a single version and a discussion of the rationale.
I have a couple of points to make about the process that might help future translators. I'm clearly not Swedish, but a few of these points are true in general for localisation work. On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 14:14 +0000, ludvig.ericson wrote: > > On Oct 4, 10:43 pm, "Dmitri Fedortchenko" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > > > Also, you changed "lade" to "la," which is just incorrect. > > > > I would not say it is "just incorrect". Plenty of searching around has not > > convinced me. > > So I am not sure anymore. As I understand it, lade till is more old > > fashioned/rural, but I could be wrong. > > > > Anyway I will yield to the original here since I am unsure. > Lade is more formal indeed, but I don't feel that we should use > colloquial language in a translation, as you note further down, it > should feel as if it was written in Swedish from the start, not > translated. I for one suggest we use formal language, because it's the > most neutral, and Svenska Akademiens ordbok lists lade as the proper > version, and la as the more colloquial one: Different countries are going to have different standards here (and it's good that there seems to be a good reference in Sweden). If in doubt, it's reasonably standard practice to err towards a more formal tone in message text. This makes the program(s) suitable for use in all environments without causing unnecessary offense or discomfort at using an inappropriately familiar tone. Previously on this list (as Ludvig no doubt remembers), we've had the discussion about formal or familiar versions of "you" (using the formal version is preferred, appeared to be the consensus). Same logic applies to these cases. [...] > The problem is that we can't adjust Django itself to work with the > language enough for it to feel completely natural, the only solution > here would be to let programmers flag a model's genus, which I don't > think will happen nor do I want to see it happen, Okay, so you realise the difficulties here. Just to point out difficult this is, noun classification (by class or gender) isn't really possibly to do in a truly multilingual fashion. The problem is that whilst, for example, a lot of Indo-European languages are gender-based (masculine, feminine, possibly a neutral or indeterminate class as well), this isn't true in African languages and some Indo-Australian languages. There, classification is a bit more role-based (e.g. animate vs. inanimate in some cases) and that is what affects adjective endings and the like. To make things worse, even in the European collection, there is contradiction. For example, sun is masculine in Latin and languages derived from that and feminine in Germanic languages. Moon is the opposite. There are others, but they are the two easy ones to remember whenever I need them. The problem we (internationalisers and translators) are up against are pretty large. :-) [...] > It'd also be nice if we could get a list of Swedish translators, I > think we're about 3-4 now, those I know are me, mr. Fedortchenko and > mr. Lindborg. Agreed. :-) Another thing that has proven very useful on other projects I've been involved with (GNOME and KDE being two example where this works) is to build up a glossary document. Any time you come across a word that is slightly tricky to translate and you have to make some decision -- even or especially if it's slightly imperfect -- note it down so that you and future translators are consistent. Ideally (and I don't know how to organise that for Django at the moment), the different languages can at least share the common English version, so that a new team doesn't have to first work out all the technical terms. It really does help in cases where you have multiple translators working on a project to have a "style guide". Even if the first paragraph says something like "our main reference is the Svenska Akademiens ordbok" and then includes the results of anything that turned out trickier than you hoped. Of course, for bonus points (the lazy approach, but you can call it "reuse") you could contact the translators from a big project like GNOME or KDE and see if they already have a glossary or wordlist you can crib off initially. :-) Anyway, like I said, it's encouraging to see a bit of debate about the precise wording. It gives me some confidence that the result will stand up under scrutiny. This list is quiet enough in general that it's not a bad place to have these discussions if you don't have your own locale-based list. Regards, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django I18N" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Django-I18N?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
