I certainly do echo your concerns about some inconveniences a translator
has to go through to get his/her job done properly.
I use Pootle only for searching term occurrences and locations in the PO
file structure. Otherwise, it is too slow compared to working with, say,
Virtaal.
For translating greater bulks of text, PO files is a fine way to go.
The greatest source of frustration are the discrete (i.e.
decontextualized) words whose meanings (sometimes in part, sometimes in
whole) can only be determined by looking at the actual UI, except that
there is no UI to look at!
If one is translating to a synthetic language such as my native
Lithuanian (other examples being Polish, Russian, etc.), the need for
syntactical and grammatical context is even greater because one has to
get right not only the concept of the original term but also the target
grammatical form for that term, of which (form) there may be quite a few...
Without the proper rendition of these forms (such as number, gender, and
case), the localized version of AOO will simply look untidy and
amateurish, pushing one to revert to the English version of AOO with all
the sad consequences of indirect conceptual assimilation...
The most graceful solution for the translation of the discrete
linguistic elements (mostly, terms in the menu lists) of the UI is to
have a translator's version and/or moder of AOO, that would allow to
edit the words directly in the UI. That would open a whole new level of
efficiency and quality control for translators and ultimately foster the
willingness of AOO end users to opt for the native UI.
A nice little example of being able to edit some of the linguistic
elements of UI, is Foobar2000 for those who know it. I wouldn't be
surprised to find out there are are more programs with a flexibility of
this sort.
These are some random observations of mine that I wanted to pass on at
the moment.
Best wishes,
Aivaras
2013.08.25 19:18, Vladislav Stevanovic rašė:
Hello,
I can see that someone of us look for a better, easier way for translating
AOO.
(Look: Brainstorming: Can we refactor the website to make translation
easier?) That is good.
I am in middle of process of translating AOO into Serbian language. My
suggestion is: when we translating on Pootle, it would be great help if
there will be path for ui, e.g. where this sentence or word are located in
ui, and how to find them in ui.
Example: "Current selection" Path: Writer/Tools/Word count
On the pootle is avaliable location where is stored this word or sentence,
but in unfamiliar way for non-programmers. Here are, I guess, present and
translators who are not an programmers. Also, for better translation,
sometimes only way to figure what means something what we want to translate
is to see in ui what actualy represent this word/sentence, what action. So,
somebody who decide about this, please take this suggestion in considering
and is it possible to do this.
We will get much more friendly-user tool for translating, and we will get
much more better translation.
Regards
Stevanović Vladislav
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