R: Translation of Ubuntu glossary and terminology in rosetta

[Milo Casagrande]

--- Mer 19/11/08, Danilo Šegan <danilo at canonical.com> ha scritto:
> 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).

Cool! And finally we can have a glossary (almost) inside Launchpad!

> 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.

That glossary is not that bad, it's probably not very well "advertised". Microsoft one is way more chaotic (and bigger) and there's no distinction between a button, a menu entry or a context-menu.

> 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). 

Indeed. I would suggest also to insert the shortcuts (_Edit, ...) in some of those strings to differentiate from button to menu entry and to have translators know which is the correct shortcut (so they can use it).

> 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).

I would appreciate having this kind of "test" for newcomers to our translation team. Is there a way (or the possibility) to have this test inside Launchpad? Not only maintaining it, but also use Launchpad to let newcomers translate it (obviously without suggestions) and then showing them which are the correct translations so they can (also) evaluate themselves and we can take a look faster at what's wrong and what's not.

> 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.

Absolutely, I was thinking even about the TP that doesn't have such a file or glossary for someone who wanted to start translating...

> 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'm more than willing to help in this project! Count me in! ;)

--
Milo Casagrande <milo_casagrande at yahoo.it>


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