Re: Should we really translate legal notices?

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
> I will look into this; thank you for bringing it up.

My apologies for taking so long. After some thought, what I and our
counsel would recommend from a legal perspective, at least for (L)GPL
apps, is giving the following text twice, once in English and the
other in the translated language:

"<program name> Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. The program is free
software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions. Click here for details. [link to license]"

If the translated license exists on the FSF website, then 'link to
license' should point at that. Translators should not translate the
full license themselves- if they want to translate it, they should
talk to the FSF and work with them to create an official translation.
If there is no translated license, then the license link should be to
the English license.

I definitely recommend doing this through the toolkit so that the text
remains consistent throughout the platform.

Let me know if this makes sense or needs clarification-
Luis

> Luis
>
> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:41 AM, Ihar Hrachyshka
> <ihar hrachyshka gmail com> wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I'd like to raise a question which was already discussed in gnome-i18n
>> with no end result [1] in legal-list gnome org hence this email.
>>
>> Recently one of Gnome localizers, Andika Triwidada, asked in gnome-i18n
>> if we should really translate legal notices found in Gnome software
>> translation catalogues. He stated that there is a policy for this in
>> Fedora Project [2] which states that asks translators not to translate
>> legal notices since such translations are risky if not approved by
>> professional lawyers (which is of course not the case for 99% of Gnome
>> translations).
>>
>> Localization participants tried to find any related policy on Gnome Wiki
>> pages with no success. Some translators stated that they translate
>> everything put in translation catalogues, legal notices included.
>>
>> It would be great if Gnome legal experts will discuss this problem in
>> more detail and end up with final policy for translators.
>>
>> Below are some examples of such translation messages. They are quite
>> common in Gnome applications translation catalogues.
>>
>> #: ../src/brasero-app.c:1153
>> msgid ""
>> "Brasero is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the "
>> "terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software "
>> "Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later "
>> "version."
>> msgstr ""
>>
>> #: ../src/brasero-app.c:1158
>> msgid ""
>> "Brasero is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY "
>> "WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS "
>> "FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more "
>> "details."
>> msgstr ""
>>
>> #: ../src/brasero-app.c:1163
>> msgid ""
>> "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with "
>> "Brasero; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin "
>> "Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA"
>> msgstr ""
>>
>> [1]: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2010-April/msg00193.html
>> [2]:
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/FAQ#Should_I_translate_legal_notices.3F
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> legal-list mailing list
>> legal-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/legal-list
>>
>