Marco Ciampa a écrit :
I'm not a english native writer, you know... ;-)
In the past I've done only a fiew little corrections when the meaning
was obvious and asking in this list when the change was not a simple
fix.
Now I'm working on blur filters and I've just noted that the german version
of the manual is (for all I've seen in this section) much better, with
more content either in written material than in example images.
I've started to, only for the blur filters, translating the section in italian,
and doing this I've updated and enlarged the english version too,
because it was very scarce at all. I've done it copying (for all that I
uderstood of) the german conten, the schema and the images.
Before committing the changes I thought that it should be better to ask the
list not only for the cvs commit action but for the meaning of all this doing:
is it the english version of the manual the most complete and the reference?
Obviously not at all! Why not? Is it a 'good thing' (TM)? From
this situation pops up a problem that I can describe well for my language
but I think that it's easy to apply to other languages too since it is
of much general concern.
No problem, I have also translated german to french and english yet when
german is better. I'll do the same if italian is better.
English is reference because most people in the world can understand it.
It is not the quality reference (it should be of course, but it is not).
It's a difficult challenge: developpers know Gimp technics well, but
don't like writing help (help in plugin browser is poor or absent...).
Artists and graphists know well how to use Gimp but don't like to write
help too (they prefer writing books). Gimp help has been written by
non-developpers and non-artists and mostly non-english natives.
So, don't be afraid writing english. Technical english is not difficult
and our "globish" can be understood by everybody.
I agree with with you: when somebody writes help for his own language,
it is good that he writes also for english. I do so.
I know much better italian than english but my knowledge will suffice (I
hope!) to make a good translation in my native tongue. This is not true
for the german language which I do not know at all (I admit that I'm not
proud of it!) and so I think for almost all the people in this list with
little, but significant, exeptions.
Now the problem is: why the people that filed the german
translation of the manual do not contributed for the english version? I
think that my contributes could only be worse than those of people that
wrote those pages, beause of my scarce knowledge of english, german
and gimp. I think that those people that are enough acquainted with
gimp to be able to write original content in native language could improve
the usefulness of those contributes with little effort if they try to write
an english version too, leaving to the other people more skilled in wrinting in
english the correction task.
A grammatical incorrect text is better than no text at all and in this manner,
all the other languages people could make a much more complete, and
correct work, in his/her native language.
I agree with all that.
PS: I'm glad if someone would like to see my patch before committing it. I do not
commit anything if there won't be a 'rough consensus' about my 'method',
if someone have some reasons to stop me, please write!
IMHO, you don't need to ask permission before committing, but, if you
want, I would be pleased to see your patch.
Julien
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