Re: Terminology



On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 07:19:52PM +0100, Mike Newman wrote:
> > Which raises the question, how does l10n work at the moment? I mean,
> > here we are having a big discussion about quite subtle points of
> > terminology. Is the same process going on with the translators? I took
> > a brief look at the gnome-i18n-list archives the other day and got the
> > impression that it was more likely to be just one person working alone
> > on the translations.
> 
> I don't think for a moment that points as subtle as this are being
> debated, simply because of the huge effort of actually translating
> things precludes much discussion. That's why I think its important that
> any document gets it right.
> 
> My suggestion to talk with i18n people was really around - "are our
> efforts wasted debating this because language X has no concept of this,
> whilst language Y has 14 different terms".

That's a worthy concern, but I'm not sure how useful it is in
practice. After all, there are a rather large number of languages in
the world and finding a word that could be easily translated and
always appropriate in all of them would take a very long time.

I also think that for a word like "options" the concept is constant,
and I think that translation is more a matter of finding the right
word for the concept than finding the most accurate translation of the
English word.


> > The upshot of all of this is that I'm in favour of "options", covering
> > all levels of technicality.
> 
> If one single term is up for grabs, I'd agree with "options" as a nice,
> non-technical way of saying "stuff you can change here".

The main reason I'm going for a single term is so that I have
something that can be used consistently on the menus. I'm sure there
are other good reasons as well...

colin

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