[Localization] The virtue of being fuzzy...

[Y.Sonoda]

Hi, Xavier!

In my situation, ( and it may be a specific situation for
Japanese as a language...), I guess there are several reason
that we can not tag as "fuzzy".

And I think one of the biggest issue is that it is slight difficult
to translate the "words" only looking at  themselves.
In Japansese ( and I guess it can be said to most of the
other languages), there are so many words which stands for
one simple English word depending on the context in which
this word is used.

That's why, in some cases, it is difficult to assign only one
Japanese word without seeing the context.
(i.e, Is this word used in the menu bar? or in the explanation
of some help messages, and so on...)

The systematic mechanism for the translation Pootle produced
for us is simply wonderful. It is very easy to use for even the
people who are not familiar with IT matters.
But I felt we need some kind of contextual information in which
situation the concerned word is used. That will considerably
help us.

I guess this is the one reason for the difficulty to assign "fuzzy" tag
to the words. (Speaking about Japanese, there's not so much
words translated yet thought...I've felt when I was doing TEST(Etoys)
translation.)

Best regards,
Spiky


2007/12/1, Xavier Alvarez <xavi.alvarez at gmail.com>:
> People,
>
> I've been noticing that very few translations make use of the
> "fuzzy" tag (if ever).
>
> I seriously doubt that all the terms have a perfect corresponding
> term and that the translations need no review. I also think that
> we are losing the oportunity to generate a more collaborative
> environment & translator community.
>
> Remember we all have our own background experiences & idiomatic
> biases... what may seem 'natural' or 'obvious' to you may not be
> the case for a child some kilometers away... :)
>
> We should probably have a space in the wiki to discuss terminology
> and translation matters, but haven't been able to think much
> about a reasonable way to address the multiple issues (source
> file, source term, target language, alternatives, errors, bugs,
> etc) in a simple way...
>
>
> Comments? Ideas?
> Xavier
>
> --
> XA
> =========
> Don't Panic!  The Answer is 42
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