Clean Sheet?

[Jonathon Blake]

Peter wrote:

> As in the translator can see how others translated the string in his/hers language or in a language that he knows 

If a person is not fluent in both the target and original language,
then they should not be doing any translation work.  Let them create
the spellchecker, write user documentation, and similar task.

The only time it makes sense for a list of "how word 'x' was
translated" is when the L10N team is creating a technical vocabulary
for a language. [Both the KiSwahili Project, and Translate.org.za have
to do that when they did their first translations.]

Even then, you still need the context.  [ Think "saw" as a noun,
versus "saw" as a verb, versus "saw" as an adjective.]

> Again... I wasn't talking about enforced fully automated memory translations but about "assisted" translations.

CAT Tools are useful --- provided one has the full context. 

>even a crooked translation might help.

A bad translation won't help anybody.  More to the point, it hinders things.

>"there is no po file for X language... would you like to create one
via automatic translation system?" and the system should create one
based on previous translations.

That is how the errors in the French Localization of OOo were created
in the first place.  And also why the Afrikaans spell checker omitted
such common words as "was", and "die".

>maybe assign fuzzy flag to all strings pending a translator review.

It would have to assign a fuzzy flag, so somebody can correct all the
errors that were made.  My working assumption is that all fuzzy string
translations are grossly incorrect.

> in my view exposure means more eyeballs... this should improve accuracy. 

Like the accuracy of Wikipedia?  Where articles are not internally
self-consistent.  The highest quality/most accurate material is
typically find in pages that have been "edited". [Look at the edit
page, and pick something between the 25th and 50th edit.  That
probably will have highest quality/accuracy.  [The exact edit to pick
depends upon whether the people saved their work as they added
material, or only after completing the material.]

> > No automagic.  Still have to have the L10N teams.
> automagic for the L10N teams ;)

Nope.  They still have to create user documentation.  Web translation
portals aren't going to help with that.  [Yes, I know of one L10N team
that used PO to translate user  documentation.  The result needed a
lot of editing. ]

> Actually I was referring to celebrity as in recognition, 

Oh.  In that instance, you have to have language support already built
in. Have all of the languages with ISO codes, and SIL codes setup,
prior to any requests for them.  Granted, you probably won't have
anybody starting an "Old Latin" L10N project.   But an Alabama or
Ontario Language Project is hypothetically possible.
[Granted, both Alabama and Ontario have very few speakers left.]

>and the project's CVS should be established.

Translation is not all that a L10N project does.

A Mongolian L10N project, working on OOo, would have to write/fix the
code, so that one can correctly input Mongolian text, without using
any kludges.  IIRC, AbiWord suffers from the same problem.

For that, working with the home project web space makes far more
sense.  It is much easier to integrate a web translation portal into a
site, than to co-ordinate between two disparate sites.

xan

jonathon
-- 
Monolingualism is a curable disease.
                               Carlos Fuentes