Angolan and Cape Verdean users

Fri Feb 17 17:29:12 UTC 2006

First let me thank you for all offers to help, but I just want to make my
point here that merging the dialects is a very bad idea. I'm quoting another
Portuguese translator (see below), who replied to the list but for some
reason his email has not reached it yet. Rui describes the situation very
clearly. And he proposes a solution that would basically put the control in
the hands of each user. Two important points:

   - The Portuguese (Portugal) team is pt, not pt_PT. The same way the
   French team is fr and the Canadian team is fr_ca. pt_PT should really be
   removed.
   - There are considerable differences between the dialects, I wish
   there weren't. I know for a fact that many Portuguese people would even
   prefer to have English in front of them as opposed to Brazilian text. I
   think in order for everyone to be able to talk about this, and for it to
   become a valid discussion, one has to be familiar with the dialects to know
   what he/she is talking about. You will not be able to write pt if you
   are not native. The effort is best used if you write in your native language
   and we have a solution like Rui proposes. For instance, Brazilians use the
   word gerenciador all the time to translate manager... well, that word
   does not even exist in the Portuguese dictionary. We use the word ficheiro
   for file... would all Brazilians be comfortable reading this? I don't
   think so. This is not a cricticism to the Brazilian dialect, I'm just
   saying it is different and one is as valid as the other one. I could go on
   and on with more examples, but that's beside the point, any individual who
   is familiar with both dialects will agree with me.
   - I am all for collaboration, and helping each other, but I have to be
   careful about total merging or integration... we already have that, everyone
   nowadays understands English, that's the way to go if we want to unify. That
   would certainly save us a lot of effort. The idea here is to localize, and
   the more loyal we are to the language the more value it brings.

Rui's message:

The nuances between Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil) are
> considerably high. To the point that sometimes, as it happened in hoary,
> some words can become ridiculous :-) It is *NOT* reiventing the wheel
> repeating translations of the same stuff with *apparently* small
> differences. Most of the times it is a very *important* question on the
> acceptance of the final product as a whole. At least,
> for the language we are discussing here.
>
> There is no problem, imho, with the current state of things
> for Portuguese (Portugal). All the /etc/environment setup is made in
> such a way if Portuguese (Portugal) translations are not available
> programs use Portuguese (Brazil) and if the latter not available, then
> use English.
>
> The same sort of thing can be made for Portuguese
> (Angola) and Portuguese (Cabo Verde). However, in this particular case,
> I really don't know what is the degree of nuances and if they are more
> used to Portuguese (Brazil) or Portuguese (Portugal), but I would bet in
> the latter. In this case the environment would be set in a chain of four
> different kinds of "Portuguese". I note that this will give some
> work because one needs to adapt the installation
> procedure, and for example, language-selector. But it can be done.
> I completely disagree in mixing things, for example,
> uploading translations of a given dialect to the other translations
> teams! The intention is really good and I appreciate a lot that we are
> concerned and having this discussion. However,  imho, it is *not* the
> way to go. Some elements of the Portuguese (Portugal) team, for example,
> have been filing bugs on problems that arise when Portuguese(Brazil
> ian) is used by default even when Portuguese
> (Portugal) translations were available . Most of those problems are now
> solved, but it shows you how important the difference is. If one wants
> to help translations of different dialects the only way to follow is to
> be fluent in that dialect, discuss problems in using Rosetta or
> translation procedures, etc.
>
> The Portuguese Rosetta team is
> is growing day-by-day, specially after each better release
> of Ubuntu and it is picking up momentum. (I note that Pt and Pt_PT is
> the same team!! And pt_PT should be deprecated!! In the
> future there will only be Pt, and Pt_Br for brazilian dialect, plus
> the others that were created now). Portuguese desktop usage is perfectly
> fine nowadays although the statistics must seem scary at first
> sight.
>
> We should be very thankful to our Brazilian friends because sometimes
> their translations help us derive the context of our own translations. I
> really hope that Cabo Verde guys and Angola come and join us fast to
> spread Ubuntu and also to spread and promote our common root language,
> so full of history. We will be here to help them.
>
> Rui Az.
> WaterSevenUb on freenode.

On 2/17/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 15:39 +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> > Jordi, copying you into this from the middle of an ubuntu-translators
> > thread.
> >
> > On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 09:32 -0500, Og Maciel wrote:
> > > Don't know who did the inicial setup and/or who chose to break the
> > > languages apart, but here are some interesting facts about the
> > > portuguese language translations under Breezy:
> > >
> > > Portuguese           071.61 26.6 percent published, 0.1 percent
> changed,
> > > 1.69 percent new, 71.61 percent untranslated
> > >
> > > Portuguese (Brazil)         060.55 35.64 percent published, 0.11percent
> > > changed, 3.7 percent new, 60.55 percent untranslated
> > >
> > > Portuguese (Portugal)       098.48 1.38 percent published, 0.01percent
> > > changed, 0.14 percent new, 98.48 percent untranslated
> > >
> > > Obviously a lot of re-inventing the wheel going here...  The same can
> > > be seen in other languages as well, such as English, Russian, French,
> > > Spanish, etc, etc...
> > >
> > > I'd like to hear back from soneone from LP about the possibility of
> > > being able to, with consent from individual team administrators, merge
>
> > > untranslated strings into one major Breezy .po if you will, so that
> > > people who choose to use a language pack that hasn't really been
> > > worked on can at least have the base?  Or maybe stop the Babel Tower
> > > madness and consolidate translations into groups (i.e. all pt_* into
> > > one) *until* every single package gets transtlated!  Then, and only
> > > then, we could break them up for personalization based on individual
> > > dialects?
> >
> > That sounds like a very good idea to me. I have no doubt that merging
> > translations, with the permission of all groups concerned, is possible.
> > Jordi will no doubt know more.
>
> A user has just pointed out to me (off-list) that merging dialects into
> a base language translation is a bad idea, because it will have dialect
> specific strings in it. That must be right.
>
> I think the correct approach is for translators who are working on
> dialects to contribute to the base translations too, before doing
> dialect specific work. Naturally, not everyone will want to do this, but
> if there is a greater amount of collaboration in general, that will
> help, I think.
>
> This is all based on the assumption (I don't know much about this) that
> the base language is the fallback language where an application is not
> translated for a particular dialect.
>
> Matt
> --
> mdke at ubuntu.com
> gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQBD9fw5tSaF0w5rBv8RApOiAJ9ngzB/ji6008I+1lr14nwnzBc61wCfb8oi
> rsZXHXNDNk1Ds1JNo8o6J0w=
> =CaJC
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-translators mailing list
> ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators
>
>
>
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