[Localization] introduction and comments

[Alexander Dupuy]

My name is Alexander Dupuy, and I just signed up as a volunteer 
translator for the XO Pootle.

Although I'm a native English speaker, I am pretty fluent in Spanish, 
having lived in Guatemala for several years, and worked on some 
translation project while I was there.  I also have some French and a 
little Portuguese, but these seem to be pretty well covered already, so 
I'll probably stick to Spanish translations.  My home workstation 
(Fedora 7) runs in Spanish localization so I have a fair amount of 
exposure to technical Spanish on a day to day basis (although perhaps 
this is not such a good thing :-).

I ran through the "Terminology" list for Pootle suggestions - and have 
noticed that there are some messages that are translated more completely 
(or accurately) in the Update 1 files but where Terminology hasn't been 
updated.  Is there any way to automatically highlight / review strings 
from Terminology that also appear (exactly) in other .po files to check 
these for consistency?  I certainly appreciate the desire for 
consistency as I find it mildly annoying that on my workstation, one 
third of the services shut down "Parando" another third "Deteniendo" and 
another third in English...most of the time it is less noticeable since 
the different applications message don't appear right next to each other.

Although I was able to edit the Terminology stuff freely, I don't seem 
to be able to do anything more than "Suggest" on the Update 1 files and 
there is no indication that my suggestions actually were recorded (not 
that I saw anyhow).  Is this expected, are there rights my Pootle 
account (Dupuy) needs to be given to do more?

I'm a software developer and know from experience how incomprehensible 
messages in programs can be, even in their native English.  So (although 
it is a lower priority) I would like to suggest that there also be an 
English localization that would allow localization efforts to improve 
the comprehensibility of the messages in English as well as other 
languages. I realize that English may not be a target language for OLPC, 
but especially with G1G1 and perhaps some countries like Nigeria there 
will be English speaking children who use the XO.

As an example of the kind of thing where this would be useful, I saw the 
following in the sugar.po Spanish translation:

Keep error: all changes will be lost           Guardar el error: se 
perderán todos los cambios

the problem here is that the developer is thinking of "Keep" as an 
application, and uses it as a sort of adjective to modify the noun 
"error."  The translator (and any English-speaking child, and probably, 
most adults) takes "keep" as a verb, and misunderstands the message 
entirely, which could better be translated into non-technical English as 
"Failed to keep (data): all changes will be lost" or something more like 
that.  These kinds of poor wording choices are most common in error 
messages that are rarely seen except in the source code, but can occur 
anywhere.  Ultimately, the problem is that developers think about a 
program in one way, but users think about it in another; one can try to 
educate the developers :-) but there are limits to what can be 
accomplished.  Having a child-friendlier English translation of their 
"technical English" messages can help to bridge the gap (and provide 
useful context for translators into other languages).

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com