Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Quality in l10n

Hi :)
+1
It certainly seems that way.  However it also seems that the number of
troublesome strings is remarkably small.  People do sometimes post
such strings to this list and various people are here ready to discuss
what they think it means.  Although some it it might look quite rough
it seems to be sufficiently obvious what is intended in most strings
so the number of posts to this list is remarkably small.

The documentation team would probably find it too tough to help with
anything like this.  It's too technical and they can't handle any type
of coding such as tags or anything.  Recently they began to be able to
edit wikis but that is mostly thanks to the efforts of a couple of
people from the translators team joining their team and showing that
it's really not as tough as they imagined.  On the other hand a couple
of native English speakers have joined this L10n mailing list and have
been learning bits&bobs.  Still, we are not very code at handling
strings with coding in them but are becoming more familiar with it as
we see it more often.  So, please be gentle with us and until we
become more familiar with all this please post strings or, even
better, entire paragraphs and we can try to let you know what we
think.

There was such a thread a few days ago but i got a bit muddled and
other people were giving better answers anyway.  Feel free to post
more!

Btw i am never sure about what people mean by "Office" these days.
When i say it, i mean LibreOffice.  If someone uses it to mean MS
Office then i usually have to ask them which version because there are
so many inconsistencies between the different versions.  With
LibreOfice it seldom matters which version.

Regards from
Tom :)





On 2 December 2013 11:39, Olivier Hallot
<olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org> wrote:
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>
> Hello
>
> As translator for LibreOffice since 2003, I often see less than optimal
> english strings to translate and I believe other translators also has
> the perception that the original english can be improved (other than typos).
>
> Although the origin of the english strings are from the developers, and
> they are focused in producing code and fixing bugs more than writing
> beautiful english, it may be necessary that we - the community and in a
> continuous process - start reviewing the linguistics in english.
>
> Se for example the use of buttons that has ellipsis (...) as string.
> What is the meaning of the ellipsis? It may vary a lot depending on the
> context: it can open a file, open a new dialog, expand an current active
>  dialog, etc... For the layman, the ellipsis can go unoticed quite often.
>
> So, for example, my plea is to replace ellipsis (...) by some more
> meaningful string as "More...", "Browse...", "Open...", etc... Many more
> strings should be reviewed because often the english language can be
> extremely concise, word-saving, often dubious, and put translators into
> trouble to find the exact meaning of the feature.
>
> That may be an easy hack, or even a task for a skilled non-programmer
> linguist, sort of transtating en-US to en-Intelligible...
>
> Kind regards
>
> Note: I am often challenged by transation of features done in Office,
> and for my personal evil satisfaction, I am happy to see they also miss
> the target completely. :-)
>
> - --
> Olivier Hallot
> Founder, Board of Directors Member - The Document Foundation
> The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 - Berlin, Germany
> Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
> Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
> LibreOffice translation leader for Brazilian Portuguese
> +55-21-8822-8812
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