Online translation tool?

Lauri Nurmi lanurmi at iki.fi
Sat Sep 29 18:08:59 UTC 2007


la, 2007-09-29 kello 14:33 +0100, Dimitris Glezos kirjoitti:
> I don't remember if I brought this up in the past, but some people have
> suggested to add a tool to our translation infrastructure for doing
> translations online. Some translators might prefer it, so we could have
> that too (as long as it integrates with our existing workflow).
> 
> Benefits: more people working on the same translation, lower barrier to
> entry, easier to handle big files, tools have workflow embedded (reviews
> etc).

Lowering the barrier for entry is not necessary desirable.  In my
opinion a translator should understand what (s)he is translating,
otherwise the translation may end up being words after another without a
meaning.

Most Fedora utilities are quite technical.  If a translator's knowledge
is limited to using a web browser and writing e-mail, then things such
as "iSCSI initiator", "volume group", or "BSD disk label" in Anaconda
are likely to be quite remote and abstract to him/her.  I am not saying
the translator should be an expert on technicalities, but at least they
should know the concept of partitioning a disk, and have some idea on
how networks work, and so on.

Also if the barrier is too low, people with a lot of enthusiasm but not
that much patience may turn up to translate a few dozen strings, and
then disappear.  To some it may be a big surprise that translating a
whole application is real work, which requires time and thinking, and is
not simply a matter of replacing English words with ones of one's own
language.

-LN





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