R: Translation of Ubuntu glossary and terminology in rosetta

[Danilo Šegan]

Hi Milo, Adi,

У сре, 19. 11 2008. у 10:35 +0000, Milo Casagrande пише:
> --- Mer 19/11/08, Adi Roiban <adi at roiban.ro> ha scritto:
> > What do you think about having the Ubuntu Glossary
> > translated in
> > Rosetta?
> > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Glossary

I think that's a pretty good idea.  If it's translated in Launchpad, we
can do all sort of smart things with it (like linkify words in English
strings to their translations from the glossary).

> > As another matter I would like to see an Ubuntu Terminology
> > file available for translations in Rosetta, following the idea
> > of MS Terminology Translation:
> > http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx
> > 
> > This file should help translators, for both documentation
> > and applications.
> 
> This is a little bit different from the previous one.
> 
> From my experience with upstream translation teams, it's not always that 
> easy to reach an agreement (inside a team) on the translation of common 
> terms. For the Ubuntu Italian team we have a glossary based on the one
> from the TP project, it's not as big as the Microsoft one, but it serves our needs.

For starters, I'd like to mention that GNOME did use to have a glossary:

  http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-i18n/trunk/glossary/

However, I believe it was too big and too verbose to be actually useful.

What we want is probably a mix of common phrases and terminology in one
place, and a glossary in another.

Eg. 
  msgctxt "Menu"
  msgid "Edit"

could be translated differently from the Edit button (i.e. you might
have a style guide that recommends using imperative form in top-level
menus).  This would be useful to define a definite standard translation
for a particular type of entry, and we should maintain it in Launchpad.
This could then be used to evaluate somebody's translation capabilities
to a language as well, before you accept them into a reviewer team (this
is actually one of Mark's old ideas).

A glossary would be a descriptive standard that explains the terms and
is not as helpful in translation.

Though, I'd like this to not be Ubuntu-specific, but to make it
Launchpad-wide so it could be shared with all the other projects hosted
in Launchpad.

> I too would like to see such a glossary for Ubuntu, and also for other
> translation projects; at least having it in English, translating it is
> another aspect to deal with (and probably not an easy one), but if we
> can create such a file, that would be just great!

If there are enough interested parties, I'd like to start a project
where we would develop both a common-phrases.pot and glossary.pot, if
that sounds sane.  However, I'd expect that you guys would be willing to
help with that as well :)

I would then also be happy to spend time linking these in Launchpad to
translation interface, but we first need to have something in place.

Cheers,
Danilo