On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 06:48:02PM +0100, Axel Wernicke wrote: > Am 20.11.2005 um 18:18 schrieb Roman Joost: > >Actually, I join Marcos opinion here. Writing grammatical incorrect text > >is better than nothing. > > And that is exactly the point where I can't agree. To sell some crude tech talk (and thats > what I could write in en) as a manual should not be what we want to do. As I see it a manual > should use a consistent flow of text with a consistent use of terms. And that is what can not > reached if a dozen of non natives just do a raw translation of what they write for their "own" > language, no matter how willing and engaged they are. Okey, I understand your point and you're right. But you're referring to an ideal situation here, which we don't have currently (and maybe won't have in the future - I'm optimistic). That is, having a native speaker for every language which cares and manages his content and translation. Due to the fact, that most people can't write and manage their content in full time, we won't be able to write documentation in high-quality in the short term. But what we can achieve is high-quality documentation in the long term (given by the fact, that people are proof reading). > > Providing a translation to english for newly written content is the > > only way other > >translators can grasp the idea about the new content. If everyone > >just translates the text, we could have a far easier setup (like > >using po and message ids). But the setup allows, that everyone can > >write more than a 1:1 translation. > [x] but if thats the case then that legitimates to extend e.g. de content without translating > it to en instantly. Hm. I don't get what you mean here. > Btw. for everything that is related to screenshots it is simply impossible > to update since I've the native terms (de in my case) only and can't say how a specific field > is called in other languages. That is true and understandable. But the only point is to provide an english translation for newly written content here. > >It is intended, that other docwriters can extend existing content as > >well as writing new one. Please give others a chance to take usage of > >new content. > > I do! Almost 50% of the time I spend with the files is about > restructuring content, and as long as anyhow possible every lang will > benefit from that changes. Of course they do. Having a consistent structure is a good basis :) > For the menu descriptions I did all the > reorganization in en;fr;de ! That was possible because almost any > necessary content was already there. And last not least can everybody > benefit from the (new) german content. I don't get how translators who don't speak german understand, what the content is about. How do they know what you or other german writers added there? > Providing a crude en translation would lead to something like > > written and thought about in de > - raw translation to en > read by someone nativ speaking [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice) > - raw translation to [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice) Yes, that could happen. > I think there are no words necessary to describe the quality of the result, and sorry for > saying so, I've seen some mess in the en that was obviously transferred one to one to another > language. All in all I think to use en as kind of intermediate language is a bad idea, > specially when sold as en manual. I understand your point. The idea behind is to fix the mess you're facing ... Nobody in our project is a professional for writing documentation. That includes that everyone can write a messy and bad understandable description and it happens from time to time. But I thought, working together on one manual should make it less error-prone and helpful. That's the spirit of free software or am I wrong? > >>guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to > >>announce "weak" translations to some proofreaders - do we have such > >>for en?? > >Nice idea, but I doubt that this will work. If some of the native > >speakers can proof read the (english) content, it'll work better than > >adding more management tasks for the docwriters. > > I'll think about that for a night - may be I get an idea of how everybody can participate from > new content without messing up the en manual. If I get it correct, than your idea was to mark some content as "translated by non-native speaker" or something. I think, this will only raise the management factor for the writers. It is always a subjective decision when an article is considered as 'done'. Maybe we should discuss a 'verifying-quality-process' in general in a new thread? Greetings, -- Roman Joost www: http://www.romanofski.de email: romanofski@xxxxxxxx
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