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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Fwd: The fluency of the KDE translations (swedish in particular)
From:       Matthias Elter <me () main-echo ! net>
Date:       1999-06-24 17:06:12
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----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: The fluency of the KDE translations (swedish in particular)
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 23:24:42 +0200
From: eh <erihe190@student.liu.se>


Hello

I've used KDE since beta1 and watched it developed ever since. What I
then felt was something great has evolved into something even better as
time went by. Today KDE is so mature and easy to use it's ready to face
Joe User. Up till today KDE has mostly been used by people familiar with
computers and unix. That generally means relativetly young, white males,
persons that aren't uncomfortable with internet, emailing and chatting
etc in English. But, as I said, all this is to change. People that maybe
doesn't know a word of English are to be using KDE. For this you need
translations. GOOD translations, which is something I feel KDE doesn't
have. It is translated into 25 (?) languages, but what I've seen from
those translations (I've mainly looked at those in my native tounge,
swedish) is in poor quality.

The translations seem to be done in a word-by-word manner and lack in
fluency and smoothness. It feels like the translations could have been
done by the babelfish or a foreign person with a wordlist. A translation
shouldn't look like one. A good translation is one that (ofcourse) are
true to it's original in it's meaning, but maybe a bit more free in it's
form. Else it will undoubtedly feel like a translation.

I will illustrate this with an example (taken from the i18n howto)

    #: kdecore/kapp.cpp:439
    msgid ""
     "The KDE Desktop Environment was written by the KDE team.\n"
    "\n"
    "Please send bug reports to kde-bugs@kde.org.\n"
    "\n"
    "\n"
    "KDE was developed with Qt, a cross-platform GUI library.\n"
    "\n"
    "Qt is a product of Troll Tech (http://www.troll.no,
info@troll.no).\n"
    "Qt may be used freely to develop free software on the X Window
System.\n"
    msgstr ""
    "KDE Desktop Environment skrevs av KDE-teamet.\n"
    "\n"
    "Vänligen, skicka bug-rapporter till kde-bugs@kde.org.\n"
    "\n"
    "\n"
    "Det här programmet utvecklades med hjälp av Qt, ett tvärkompatibelt
"
    "GUI-bibliotek.\n"
    "\n"
    "Qt tillverkas av Troll Tech AS (http://www.troll.no,
info@troll.no). Qt får "
    "användas fritt för att utveckla fri programvara på X Window
System.\n"

    "Please send bug reports to kde-bugs@kde.org.\n"
are translated to
    "Vänligen, skicka bug-rapporter till kde-bugs@kde.org.\n"

Which may look fine, and have the correct meaning, "be nice, report bugs
to us", the problem here is just that swedes aren't that polite and
formal ;). For example, in Sweden you're always using "du" (du) to
address people, not "Ni" (Sie) (I assume you're german?). I guess that
theres something with please and the likes too, we're just not that
polite and formal. This "Vänligen, bla bla bla" is something you would
write in formal letter, but here it just feels wrong, it would be better
to simply drop the "Vänligen," or even rephrase it in swedish
"Rapportera buggar till kde-bugs@kde.org." (Report bugs to
kde-bugs@kde.org). It just feels more natural.

    "KDE was developed with Qt, a cross-platform GUI library.\n"
    "\n"
    "Qt is a product of Troll Tech (http://www.troll.no,
info@troll.no).\n"
    "Qt may be used freely to develop free software on the X Window
System.\n"
are translated to
    "Det här programmet utvecklades med hjälp av Qt, ett tvärkompatibelt
"
    "GUI-bibliotek.\n"
    "\n"
    "Qt tillverkas av Troll Tech AS (http://www.troll.no,
info@troll.no). Qt får "
    "användas fritt för att utveckla fri programvara på X Window
System.\n"

Also correct in context, ofcourse, but doesn't feel right. For instance,
"cross-platform" are translated to "tvärkompatibelt", a word I've never
heard. Cross-platform might be hard to translate, but I think it's the
wrong aproach to invent a new word nobody has ever heard of (same with
"GUI-bibliotek") instead of maybe rephrase it into a description of what
cross-platform means. My suggestion for that phrase would be "KDE
utvecklades med Qt, som är ett grafikbibliotek som stödjer flera
plattformar" (KDE was developed with Qt, which is a graphics library
supporting several platforms).

I won't bore you with more examples, I just wanted to show you what I
mean. It's those small little details I'm after. Whitout them, a
translation would just be replacing each word with the corresponding
one, a method that would produce very strange translations. What I'm
after here are obviously some fluency, a feeling
that this was written in swedish (or whatever).

So, what to do about it? Well, I don't think theres a shortcut to become
a good writer, translator, to get a good feel for a language (not
anymore then it is to be a good coder). What can be done is to ensure
that the translators are good at expressing themselves (not necessarily
in english) and help them to understand how text of this kind must be
translated. This can be done via howtos that not only focuses on the
"technical" side of translation (in which form it should be written,
about printf style formatting etc), but also the real translation part.
What obstacles are there, how do you get around certain things, etc.
Ofcourse this is very ambitious, and I don't think anythink cant replace
a good humanistic education, but... Also, this can differ a great deal
from language to language, but there are a whole bunch of general tips
and tricks to be learnt.

Also, I think more thought must be put into coordinating translation
into a specific language. I'm thinking about that differant persons
translate things diffrently. It might be such things as writing style,
but also for example what you call widgets. This might be hard to see,
when several names in a language are generally accepted for a widget or
a feature, but it takes something away from consistency. I'm sure there
are a lot to think about.


Anyway... This was my little rant about translations and I hope that it
raised some thoughts and will contribute to a better KDE.

//Erik Heneryd erihe190@student.liu.se


ps. Just wanted to take the opportunity to correct a german's german
(something I never thought would happen) :) In the i18n-howto there's
this example somewhere near the end:

#~ msgid "&How can I ..."
#~ msgstr "&Wie kann ich ...?"

Ich is a noun, german nouns always begins with a capital. Seriously
though, there were a bunch of spelling errors and such in the howto, not
that it matters, but it doesn't look good. Use a spellchecker.

Theres also some grammatical and spelling errors in
http://www.kde.org/messages/sv.messages, but i guess that's an old
version (I hope)

ds.
--
Matthias Elter
me@kde.org / me@main-echo.net
Computer science student university of Wuerzburg

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