Debian Developers - [RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis

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[RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis

Christian Perrier

2004-06-27, 2:47 am

<troll size="huge">There is a conspiracy against translators and
translation teams</troll>

For instance, the current debconf translation statistics give 90% as
the translation ratio for debconf templates in French. This ratio is
constant for months despite the daily efforts of the team.

Indeed, this should be near 98-99%. The remaining 8-9% are just
sitting in the BTS.

Same ratio for several other l10n teams.

Why this_?

Let's have a look at
http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~mquinson/...debconf.fr.html

(Martin, could you add a calculation of "translation ratio if all bugs
were fixed" here?)

-maintainers constantly changing templates for their package. This is
mostly the first part of the above page ("Packages with po-debconf support
and for which translation is underway")

We see here packages which had recent template changes. Of course,
most of the time, the maintainer does not really consider translators
and just uploads his/her package with modified templates, not caring
about fuzzied translations.

Moreover, after, this he/she receives updates, from the French team
as well as other teams

Some of you guys take care of them...and after a few days upload a new
version with the updated templates. Thanks to you, you're by chance
the majority.

Obviously, some don't give a s***t about these updates and the
translations sit in the BTS for WEEKS (look at the bloody stats!!).
143 days, 106 days, 101 days......

Also, please stop changing templates over and over. Some seem to
be very good specialists at doing this and this really pisses off
translators, especially when changes are done without coordination
with translators. Sometimes, also, writing silly useless templates
is involved (but here, bug reports for debconf abuse most often
follow very quickly)....or writing them not very carefully, then
receive typo bug reports...

-maintainers being lazy for incorporating translations
after adding debconf stuff or switching to po-debconf
This is the " Packages with po-debconf support and for which
translation is to do" part of the above page

Here we have packages which, most often, switched to the use of
po-debconf....very often because one of us, translators, provided
a patch for doing so.

After the switch, maintainers have received translation updates from
various translation teams.

And, here again, it seems they don't care of these (after all,
they're wishlist bugs, yeah_? And who cares about wishlist bugs).

What really justifies waiting for 222 days, 160 days, 134 days
before uploading a package just including an extra debian/po/xx.po
file?

Folks, I mentioned in my debconf talk that maintainers/translators war
are way over. Please act for this to remain true.

Please UPLOAD fixed packages and, at least temporarily, raise the
translation issues in your TODO list.

Otherwise, I'm afraid some "l10n NMU" will start happening soon and
I'm pretty sure this will raise some flame wars again about what
justifies NMU's.

End of pissed off bubulle rant....

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Marco d'Itri

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

On Jun 27, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:

> Some of you guys take care of them...and after a few days upload a new
> version with the updated templates. Thanks to you, you're by chance
> the majority.
I do not think this is a good thing. Packages with updated templates
should be uploaded in time for the release, but IMO doing a new upload
only because of the translations wastes bandwith and buildds time.

--
ciao, |
Marco | [6931 quyl5f//9SH7A]

Petter Reinholdtsen

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

[Marco d'Itri]
> I do not think this is a good thing. Packages with updated templates
> should be uploaded in time for the release, but IMO doing a new
> upload only because of the translations wastes bandwith and buildds
> time.

Translations need testing too. They need to be exposed to users, to
make sure misunderstandings are detected and fixed as soon as
possible. In addition, this process also normally exposes confusing
or inaccurate english phrases, which need to be fixed as soon as
possible to make sure all translators manage to update the
translations.

Updating translations in the archive is not a waste of bandwidth and
buildd time.

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Nicolas Bertolissio

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

Le dimanche 27 juin 2004, Marco d'Itri écrit :
> On Jun 27, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
>
> I do not think this is a good thing. Packages with updated templates
> should be uploaded in time for the release, but IMO doing a new upload
> only because of the translations wastes bandwith and buildds time.

This is because you do this the wrong way, you should ask translators
from your templates to update their translations _before_ uploading,
this can be done winthin 3 / 4 days with translation being proofread by
the translation team.

Regards

Nicolas Bertolissio
--

Marco d'Itri

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

On Jun 27, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:

> Translations need testing too. They need to be exposed to users, to
Translations should be reviewed by the language translation team before
uploading, so they are supposed to have a decent quality level anyway.

--
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Marco | [6933 ch0x/MTTOj.lw]

Marco d'Itri

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

On Jun 27, Nicolas Bertolissio <nico.bertol-no-spam@free.fr> wrote:

> This is because you do this the wrong way, you should ask translators
> from your templates to update their translations _before_ uploading,
> this can be done winthin 3 / 4 days with translation being proofread by
> the translation team.
Agreed. Do we have an infrastructure to upload new template files?

--
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Marco | [6934 imr5kucfnhIwE]

Matthew Palmer

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:05:13PM +0200, Nicolas Bertolissio wrote:
> Le dimanche 27 juin 2004, Marco d'Itri ?crit :
>
> This is because you do this the wrong way, you should ask translators
> from your templates to update their translations _before_ uploading,
> this can be done winthin 3 / 4 days with translation being proofread by
> the translation team.

If I've got twelve languages translated in my package (not that I do, I
think I've maxed two, I just picked the number at semi-random), it starts to
get rather annoying to look in twelve .po files for the Language-Team and
send the new version of my POT (and, if I recall correctly, the old .po) to
them all. A script (maybe in devscripts or something), well-publicised (ie
mentioning it prominently in the initial bug report e-mails), which will do
this work automatically, would encourage maintainers to report updated
translations.

What would be even better would be a pre-packaged version of the little
fragment that was floating around a while ago to check out of date
translations:

#!/bin/sh

for i in debian/po/*.po; do
echo $i
msgfmt -o /dev/null --statistics $i
done

with added functionality to send the updated POT to the fuzzied teams,
probably along with the old one and whatever else might be useful. The
script could then warn the maintainer that N translations were out of date,
that the relevant data has been sent to the translation teams, and to wait a
certain amount of time before uploading to collect new translations.

Getting checks put into the relevant places (lintian and linda come to mind
immediately) to check for outdated translations and warn the maintainer to
run the po-update script before release, and the associated other things. I
think lintian might already warn about fuzzy translations -- but, again,
it's been too long for me to remember that reliably.

Most maintainers (I think) don't *want* to screw up translators, but since
translation doesn't get changed that often (relatively speaking), it tends
to swap out. For instance, I can't remember exactly what has to be sent to
translators. I also don't always remember to run pocheck over my packages
before upload, and there's often long-term jumps between changes in a
package in preparation for an upload.

- Matt

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Petter Reinholdtsen

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

[Marco d'Itri]
> Translations should be reviewed by the language translation team
> before uploading, so they are supposed to have a decent quality
> level anyway.

This do not remove the need for testing.

There can be charset conversion problems, dialog size limits, and
misunderstandings only discovered when a user of the package read the
text. It is not an option to delay upload with updated translations
to just before a release of debian.

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Mark Brown

2004-06-27, 7:49 am

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 09:59:53AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:

> translators, especially when changes are done without coordination
> with translators. Sometimes, also, writing silly useless templates

What sort of coordination with translators would you like to see? I had
been under the impression that uploading packages containing new
templates and translations was all that was needed.

--
"You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream - or a fever."

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Junichi Uekawa

2004-06-27, 10:11 am

> > translators, especially when changes are done without coordination
>
> What sort of coordination with translators would you like to see? I had
> been under the impression that uploading packages containing new
> templates and translations was all that was needed.

The ideal coordination would be

1. Notify every translators and receiving translation before inital upload
(so that we don't have a window of non-translated package in sid)

A non-ideal coordination would be :

2. Accepting translations after uploading package with untranslated
text and uploading a package.

The worst case; which consists about 10% of Debian:

3. Not accepting translations until some major change is applied to
package; by which time the translation is already outdated.

choice 1 gives 100% translation rate, 2 gives a lower translation
rate with untranslated text in unstable. 3 gives a very much lower
translation rate with untranslated text found in stable distribution.

regards,
junichi

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Stephen Gran

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

This one time, at band camp, Matthew Palmer said:
> If I've got twelve languages translated in my package (not that I do, I
> think I've maxed two, I just picked the number at semi-random), it startsto
> get rather annoying to look in twelve .po files for the Language-Team and
> send the new version of my POT (and, if I recall correctly, the old .po) to
> them all. A script (maybe in devscripts or something), well-publicised (ie
> mentioning it prominently in the initial bug report e-mails), which will do
> this work automatically, would encourage maintainers to report updated
> translations.
>
> What would be even better would be a pre-packaged version of the little
> fragment that was floating around a while ago to check out of date
> translations:
>
> #!/bin/sh
>
> for i in debian/po/*.po; do
> echo $i
> msgfmt -o /dev/null --statistics $i
> done
>
> with added functionality to send the updated POT to the fuzzied teams,
> probably along with the old one and whatever else might be useful. The
> script could then warn the maintainer that N translations were out of date,
> that the relevant data has been sent to the translation teams, and to wait a
> certain amount of time before uploading to collect new translations.

Rough proof of concept (echo's rather than actually does it):

cat ~/trans_request debian/po/templates.pot > ~/trans-request.tmp
for i in debian/po/*.po
do if msgfmt -o /dev/null --statistics $i 2>&1 | egrep -q '(fuzzy|untranslated)'
then mailto=`grep 'Last-Translator' $i | cut -f2 -d: | sed -e s/\>.*/\>/`
echo "mail -s \"New translation needed\" \"$mailto\" < ~/trans-request.tmp"
echo "Request for new translation for $i emailed to $mailto"
fi
done
rm ~/trans-request.tmp

And ~/trans_request contains some boilerplate like:

Thank you for your work on translations for my package in the past.
I have made some changes to the debconf templates, and would appreciate
it if you could spare the time to update the translation. templates.pot
below - please contact me if you need anything further.

Thanks again,

Obviously, change
echo "mail -s \"New translation needed\" \"$mailto\" < ~/trans-request.tmp"
to
mail -s "New translation needed" "$mailto" < ~/trans-request.tmp

to make it do anything - I just used echoes as a test. Also, it may be
better to change the `grep 'Last-Translator'` to `grep 'Language-Team'`,
but I am not sure.

HTH,
--
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| `- http://www.debian.org |
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Colin Watson

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:36:18PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Jun 27, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
>
> Translations should be reviewed by the language translation team before
> uploading, so they are supposed to have a decent quality level anyway.

Code should be checked by the upstream maintainer and the Debian
maintainer before uploading, so it's supposed to have a decent quality
level anyway.

.... that doesn't mean bugs never happen. :-)

--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]

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martin.quinson@free.fr

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Selon Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>:

> [Marco d'Itri]
>
> This do not remove the need for testing.
>
> There can be charset conversion problems, dialog size limits, and
> misunderstandings only discovered when a user of the package read the
> text. It is not an option to delay upload with updated translations
> to just before a release of debian.

And I'm rather sure that the release manager will not like the fact that a whole
bunch of libraries get recompiled to update the translation just before the
release. Recompiling stuff can triger subtle bugs, can't it?

For the waste of bandwidth, it's not the fault of translators. Someone ought to
implement a diff or rsync solutions for the debian packages. Using the debsums
to prepare some kind of "update package", with only the files which got changed
also comes to mind. In the meanwhile, that's rather anoying as translator to
feel that even we do our best to help, some people don't care. Uploading a
package is far easier that translating it, isn't it?

For the waste if time on buildd, I hope you don't mean that the time of a robot
is more important than the time of the human translator, do you? Moreover,
beside some specific architectures like arm ans sparc, where the compilation of
a beast like X can last for days, I have the feeling that we do not leak
compilation power. What is missing here seem to be humans checking the results
(cf the "maybe-failed" and "maybe-successful" results of the robot).

I am thinking about a tool which could help for those two problems since a long
time, but I never had the time to actually implement it. A *very* crude
prototype is in the logs of the oldest translation bug of the french team (226
days). That's #220803, against libpam-ldap, maintained by Stephen Frost (hello
there ;).

The concern of Stephen is that in order to upload his package, he has to
recompile it, and he don't want to deal with the binary incompatibilities it may
trigger. So, the tool would take a binary package, an updated source tree, and
produce another binary package with the exact content of the previous one,
beside of the translation material (and debian changelog, debsums), which would
come from the source tree.

Such uploads could be given a specific kind of numering, such as changing the
fourth part of the package number (xx-1.0.0.1). This would even allow the buildd
to detect this fact, and do the same trick for their architecture (altrought it
ought to be done very carefully).

As I said, a proof of concept can be found in #220803, but that's very far from
being a usable implemention.

In summary, translation upload induce three problems (bandwidth, buildd,
recompilation), but theoritical solutions for all of them exist. The problem is
that very few people have both the time and the motivation to tackle them.
Translators struggle to keep there work uptodate despite the current situation,
and every people feeling concerned by those problems ends up being translator...

Any volunteer? ;)
Mt.

PS: Sorry for any brokenness of the webmail email.

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martin.quinson@free.fr

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Selon Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT>:

> On Jun 27, Nicolas Bertolissio <nico.bertol-no-spam@free.fr> wrote:
>
>
> Agreed. Do we have an infrastructure to upload new template files?

It's underway here:
http://cvs.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bi...oot=debian-l10n

For now, there is only tools to gather statistics from the debian packages, and
display it in the same manner than
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/
does, but the final plan is to put all the translations found in the packages in
a CVS tree (easy since we have to find them to do the current stats), and design
the needed corresponding tools for both translators and packagers.

But, dudes, I cannot write all the damn scripts we need to get Debian not only
usable by 40% of the earth but also by non [native] english speakers...

That all to say that all technical issues you raised so far are known, that we
leak the manpower to plug them right now, and that we all have to deal with that
fact. Translators struggle with emails, mailing list and the BTS even if they
only constitute crude solutions (how to update a translation submitted to the
BTS?), so it would be fair if the packagers not already doing so would take the
needed half an hour to upload their work...

Thanks for your time, Mt.

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martin.quinson@free.fr

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Selon Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>:

>
> <troll size="huge">There is a conspiracy against translators and
> translation teams

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
-- Napoleon
</troll>

> For instance, the current debconf translation statistics give 90% as
> the translation ratio for debconf templates in French. This ratio is
> constant for months despite the daily efforts of the team.
>
> Indeed, this should be near 98-99%. The remaining 8-9% are just
> sitting in the BTS.

Dude, I understand that you're pissed of by the current situation, I get that
feeling sometimes, but you forgot to mention one of the main reason for that fact.

Last january, the french translation team had a ratio of about 98%, the 2
missing percents seeming to be impossible to get, due to some packagers actively
refusing to do translation-only uploads (Stephen Frost comes to mind, hi there).

But this ratio was only about the new gettext based translations. So, I decided
to provide patches to packagers still providing debconf-utils based debconf
packages. For memory, this is deprecated since version 1.2.28 of debconf,
released on Sat, 22 Feb 2003 14:23:16 -0500.

So, I started submitting patches to those packages. When I begun (2 Feb 2004),
there was 246 such packages, 57 of them having a reported bug about that. Now,
"only" 133 packages use debconf without po-debconf, and there is 91 openned bug
repports (I was waiting to find the time to prepare the 44 missing patches
before launching the "discution", but Christian was quicker...)

The collateral dammage was to let the amount of stuff to translate grow by more
than 50%...

So, yeah. To all the reasons mentionned in this tread to explain the drop of
statistics despite translator efforts, we have to add my own effort to get ride
of a system deprecated since almost one year and half...

Thanks for your time, Mt.

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Quoting martin.quinson@free.fr (martin.quinson@free.fr):

> But this ratio was only about the new gettext based translations. So, I decided
> to provide patches to packagers still providing debconf-utils based debconf
> packages. For memory, this is deprecated since version 1.2.28 of debconf,
> released on Sat, 22 Feb 2003 14:23:16 -0500.
>
> So, I started submitting patches to those packages. When I begun (2 Feb 2004),
> there was 246 such packages, 57 of them having a reported bug about that. Now,
> "only" 133 packages use debconf without po-debconf, and there is 91 openned bug
> repports (I was waiting to find the time to prepare the 44 missing patches
> before launching the "discution", but Christian was quicker...)

Well, of course, I'm aware of this, but it seems that now the packages
which switch to po-debconf are very few compared to what happened in
mid-2003 when Michel and I started the work, and early 2004 when
yourself continued it.

And, despite this, we currently do *not* move from 90% for months. I
monitor changes nearly daily and what keeps us at this ratio are
mostly changes to existing translations....and new packages adopting
po-debconf.

Hence the rant....:-)

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Quoting Mark Brown (broonie@sirena.org.uk):

> What sort of coordination with translators would you like to see? I had
> been under the impression that uploading packages containing new
> templates and translations was all that was needed.

Junichi did a good resume of it.

The most frustrating case are the typo fixes made to debconf templates
(most often mixed with other changes in the package). Any single
change in original English strings will mark translations as
"fuzzy". These translations will not be used until they are fixed.

If the maintainer uploads the package just after the fix, it will
contain the fuzzied translations.

What I expect him/her to do is warning the translators. Just "grep
"^Last-Translator" debian/po/*po and send each of them a copy of
"their" PO file after the change and "debconf-updatepo".

Then wait a couple of days for receiving the updates (if the changes
are trivial, they do not need review....if they aren't, the
translation teams review system may induce some delay....in that case,
waiting may not be appropriate).

Again, most of you guys are really good at this. As usual a few "black
sheeps" (no iffnsive intent here....just a lack of the appropriate
words) still make the problem visible.

Another solution for coordinating with translators is by posting a
mail to debian-i18n explaining the changes you made and pointing them
to the needed files. Or just ask there for advices...:-)

And, last but not least, please make your best for avoinding
translations sitting in the BTS for weeks.

Doing a "l10n upload" from time to time is A Good Thing. You will
trigger the autobuilders to rebuild it with may help in tracking down
nasty FTBFS bugs...:-)

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Quoting Petter Reinholdtsen (pere@hungry.com):
> [Marco d'Itri]
>
> This do not remove the need for testing.
>
> There can be charset conversion problems, dialog size limits, and
> misunderstandings only discovered when a user of the package read the
> text. It is not an option to delay upload with updated translations
> to just before a release of debian.

And just imagining that translation teams do a perfect job is just a
dream.

First of all, several "teams" are just one or two individuals, so the
redundancy needed for a very detailed check is not achieved.

And, anyway, even with the most active teams, mistakes still escape
from the review process. The mistakes mentioned by Petter...but also
more simple mistakes.

What Marco mentions is a kind of string freeze and translation
exhuamtion process from the BTS before releases. Of
course, this *also* has to happen....

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-28, 9:00 am

Quoting Stephen Gran (sgran@debian.org):

>
> Obviously, change
> echo "mail -s \"New translation needed\" \"$mailto\" < ~/trans-request.tmp"
> to
> mail -s "New translation needed" "$mailto" < ~/trans-request.tmp
>
> to make it do anything - I just used echoes as a test. Also, it may be
> better to change the `grep 'Last-Translator'` to `grep 'Language-Team'`,
> but I am not sure.

Instead of attaching the templates.pot file, the script could
"msgmerge -U xx.po templates.pot", then send the xx.po file.

About the mail recipients_: why not sending to Last-Translator and
CC'ing to the team?

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Simon Richter

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

Hi,

[vbcol=seagreen]
> I do not think this is a good thing. Packages with updated templates
> should be uploaded in time for the release, but IMO doing a new upload
> only because of the translations wastes bandwith and buildds time.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-deve...8/msg02329.html ?

Simon

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

> It would be nice if debconf-updatepo could fire up an editor for an
> e-mail with those recipients, a boilerplate text and templates.pot as an
> attachment. Unfortunately, I'm not the one who's going to write the
> patch this week or next...

IIRC, I filed a wishlist BR to po-debconf for this. But Denis Barbier
is in low activity mode currently so we probably need someone else to
write this script.

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martin.quinson@free.fr

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

Selon Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>:

> Hi,
>
>
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-deve...8/msg02329.html ?

Indeed, it looks interesting. Did you go any further wrt implementation ?

Thanks, Mt.

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Marc Haber

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 13:36:18 +0200, Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT> wrote:
>On Jun 27, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
>Translations should be reviewed by the language translation team before
>uploading, so they are supposed to have a decent quality level anyway.

Being a German native speaker, I write everything in English.
Occasionaly, some other German native speaker decides to translate my
work to German.

Usually, I am not impressed by the translations because they usually
feel clumsy and awkward to me, as if I were explaining the things to a
child. Strangely, most German translations of commercial software
doesn't sound that clumsy - probably because I don't know the english
version?

I'd like to know whether I am the only one who feels uncomfortable
with technical software in the native language.

Greetings
Marc

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Marc Haber

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 04:01:30 +0200, martin.quinson@free.fr wrote:
>For the waste of bandwidth, it's not the fault of translators. Someone =
ought to
>implement a diff or rsync solutions for the debian packages. Using the =
debsums
>to prepare some kind of "update package", with only the files which got =
changed
>also comes to mind. In the meanwhile, that's rather anoying as =
translator to
>feel that even we do our best to help, some people don't care. Uploading=
a
>package is far easier that translating it, isn't it?

I'd like to have a way to package and download translations separately
from the package. I don't want anything more than plain english to
take up space on my systems.

Greetings
Marc

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martin.quinson@free.fr

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

Selon Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de>:

> On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 13:36:18 +0200, Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT> wrote:
>
> Being a German native speaker, I write everything in English.
> Occasionaly, some other German native speaker decides to translate my
> work to German.
>
> Usually, I am not impressed by the translations because they usually
> feel clumsy and awkward to me, as if I were explaining the things to a
> child. Strangely, most German translations of commercial software
> doesn't sound that clumsy - probably because I don't know the english
> version?

I dunno about the german version, but the french version often sounds far more
professionnal to me than the english one. Correct grammar, no familiarity
(personalisation of the computer) and such are a real improvement, IMHO.

I don't speak about your personal production, of course (I don't know it), but
it's my general impression.

> I'd like to know whether I am the only one who feels uncomfortable
> with technical software in the native language.

Erm. I can understand you don't personnaly want to use the translated version to
your native language, but I do think that using a not translated
system/software is simply not an option for some people.

So, the whole debate here seems to come down to whether we want to provide a
system for hackers or for [lamda] users.

I'd like us to be able to do both, and I belive it is the case.
Mt.

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Simon Richter

2004-06-28, 7:34 pm

Hi,

[vbcol=seagreen]
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Indeed, it looks interesting. Did you go any further wrt implementation ?

Not really. It's on my list still, but it has been since three years
now. Whether I get around to it depends on whether I can pay for food
next month.

Simon

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-29, 3:18 am

Quoting Marc Haber (mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de):

> Being a German native speaker, I write everything in English.

Do you also daily speak English when going to the grocery store? Or
when ordering a bier in a bar?

I guess not and I guess I know why_: mostly because the people you're
talking with are not English speakers.

These people also deserve a Linux distribution they may use daily
which is mostly why some other German people care about
translations. Just like the kids and teachers in Norway need a
norwegian-speaking Skolelinux. Even though these Norwegian people most
often speak damn good English as well.

When working on l10n stuff, I think I work more for a much wider
target than the geek community. That is the point.

> Occasionaly, some other German native speaker decides to translate my
> work to German.
>
> Usually, I am not impressed by the translations because they usually
> feel clumsy and awkward to me, as if I were explaining the things to a

They maybe feel clumsy because the german team does not have enough
manpower...or because you're not used to them. And, believe me, the
german translation uses far more englishisms than the french one for instance.

But, as Martin wrote, they probably don't look more or less clumsy
than some "English" things I see here and there in free software.

As I mentioned elsewhere, English is probably among the worst
translations in Debian.....

So, you're maybe comfortable with (bad) English. I personnally am more
comfortable with good French. This is also the reason I use my crappy
french keyboard though it's definitely not geeky (a good french geek
uses a US keyboard and just makes strange incantations for entering
the appropriate characters with it)

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-29, 3:18 am

Quoting Frank Küster (frank@debian.org):

>
> Me, too. Except that I sometimes also provide my own german
> translations.

I very often discourage this. Or at least, try to get in touch with
your language translation team.

All l10n team have common use for their work, for instance always use
the same words for translating some specific topics or words.

So, getting in touch with them is often a matter of style consistency
which is quite important when building a full distribution.

BTW, Frank, thanks for asking me to update the french translation of
one of your packages a few hours ago...:-)

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Colin Watson

2004-06-29, 10:28 am

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 12:32:20AM +0200, martin.quinson@free.fr wrote:
> I dunno about the german version, but the french version often sounds
> far more professionnal to me than the english one. Correct grammar, no
> familiarity (personalisation of the computer) and such are a real
> improvement, IMHO.

I agree about correct grammar, but whether familiarity is
"unprofessional" is language-dependent, I feel. I've never found it to
be a problem in English.

> So, the whole debate here seems to come down to whether we want to
> provide a system for hackers or for [lamda] users.

"lamda"?

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Simon Richter

2004-06-29, 10:28 am

Hi,

[vbcol=seagreen]
> They maybe feel clumsy because the german team does not have enough
> manpower...or because you're not used to them. And, believe me, the
> german translation uses far more englishisms than the french one for instance.

The biggest problem in the German translations are the different
politeness forms, and especially that you use a different form for
talking to people on the Internet than you use in DebConf templates.
Thus, a lot of people try to avoid using pronouns altogether, which
leads to a lot of substantivation and concatenation of substantives
(note how the average word length increased over this paragraph; I also
think that looks very clumsy :-P ).

I'm not sure what we are supposed to do about this; personally I'd like
my computer to talk to me in an informal way; a lot of other people
think different. A possible idea would be to have different flavours of
the German translations.

Simon

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-29, 10:28 am

> The biggest problem in the German translations are the different
> politeness forms, and especially that you use a different form for
> talking to people on the Internet than you use in DebConf templates.

Such as using either "du" or "Sie", I guess.

I have noticed that both german and italian teams most often use "du"
and "tu" for "you" in user interaction texts. Most languages have this
notion of 2nd person singular form which modern English does not use anymore.

It's a matter of fact that all french l10n teams I'm aware of strictly
avoid to use the "tu" for "you", but always "vous". At least in
French, but I'm pretty sure it's similar for German or Italian , "tu"
is far too familiar for being "professionnal"_: in all our languages,
when meeting someone for the first time, using a familiar form looks
strange (except...in electronic communication)

The Internet discussions have changed this, as this is common use to
use "du", or "tu" in mailing lists, IRC, newsgroups. But this is
relevant in the Internet communication world....and I would definitely
not recommend using this (we call it "tutoiement" in French, I have no
idea of the appropriate English term) in the screens we show to users.

Italian people seem to think different as I just finished a d-i test
in italiano and I saw lots of "tu"....

Your mail seems to show there are similar debates in the german l10n
teams...thankfully, we don't have these in the french team...even
though we all use "le tutoiement" in our mailing lists_!

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-29, 10:28 am

Quoting Mike Hommey (mh@glandium.org):

> PS: What about an english localisation ?

Why not_?

Besides the traditional US vs. UK glitches, having a en_GB (or
en_US...or just simply "en") "localisation" would probably guarantee
that our screens to use good English and not the crappy mixture of
words we all use when communicating in English, like I'm currently
doing..:-)

debian-l10n-english is here for that purpose also, btw

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Keld Jørn Simonsen

2004-06-29, 5:59 pm

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 03:50:39PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
>
>
> And except in swedish and perhaps other scandinavian languages. If I
> remember right, they "decided" to drop the equivalent of "Sie"/"vous"
> some decades ago.

In Danish translations we always use the less formal "du" in stead of
the formal "De" as a translation of "you". Somtimes we use the informal
"man" or write it in the passive mode. But I think there should be a
more friendly tone between the computer and the user - the computer is
your friend - not your business partner.

Best regards
Keld

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Marc Haber

2004-06-29, 5:59 pm

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 07:11:10 +0200, Christian Perrier
<bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
>What I expect him/her to do is warning the translators. Just "grep
>"^Last-Translator" debian/po/*po and send each of them a copy of
>"their" PO file after the change and "debconf-updatepo".

Publish a script doing so and bug the lintian/linda maintainers to
warn on fuzzied translations.

Greetings
Marc

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Andrew M.A. Cater

2004-06-29, 5:59 pm

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 10:42:17AM +0200, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:
> martin.quinson@free.fr schrieb:
>
>
> Same here.
>
Being a native English speaker who speaks French/Spanish - I'm not
surprised when translations into French/Spanish seem clumsy. I've
tried to post technical French on the debian-french lists - I come
over as (potentially) correct but very stilted and artificial. My
French must seem _very_ odd to a French native speaker - as if I
swallowed the dictionary and grammar books

By the same token,
I can spot when a non-native speaker has translated a technical document
because it isn't quite idiomatic / reads more correctly in the original.

I have seen my own HOWTO translated into "foreign" - it is the hardest
task in the world to produce good quality translation. I'm always
impressed and surprised by the ease and facility with which
Germans/French and others express themselves within these Anglophone
lists on the Debian servers.[vbcol=seagreen]
>
> In my case I could do myself. The reason to give a German translation
> low priority are: The english original should be top quality first. The
> package is addressed to admins.
>
>
> Keep it simple, is a good decision. But I think, I know what you mean.
>
> Hmm ... my experience is, that English is more straight ahead and
> shorter than German. Having only basic knowledge of French, it seems
> IMHO more complicated than German to express technical things. If your
> French version is more professional, than the English one must be of
> very bad quality.
>
Not bad quality, just "different". In translating a long English phrase,
I've sometimes needed to use two French phrases, for example.

>
> Besides the usual checklist (grammar, spelling, unique style, short
> sentences) the most important thing is wording consistancy. IMHO this
> should be done in the original version first, and then issue a "ready to
> translate" message.
>
>
It probably just looks a bit odd - if you spend 7 hours a day with
technical English, technical <anything else> feels slightly odd

If I spend 45 minutes reading French/Spanish, it takes a minute or two
to come back to English

> Using only English has a lot of advantages. Just paste an error message
> to google and you will find a solution for the problem.
>
> But as you can see from translation activity, other people do not have
> the same opinion, e.g. Brazilians or Japanese. There is a strong need
> for translation, and this should be supported in the best way.
>

We have to do the best we can. It may be worth doing stuff even for
15-20,000 people (KDE localisation to Upper Sorbian, for example)
if it feels right.[vbcol=seagreen]
>
> ACK. The ideal solution is, that everybody can change the language at
> runtime, e.g. via hotkey. Hard to implement, and overkill in most cases
> - I know.

ACK
>
>
> Or if debian targets only to experts, or also to beginners. I vote for
> the beginners. Nobody can be expert in everything.

Just my 0.02 Euro

Andy

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-29, 5:59 pm

Quoting Helmut Wollmersdorfer (helmut.wollmersdorfer@gmx.at):

> "localisation" is a good example, that simple "en" is not possible. US

I think I was aware of this..:-)

> spelling is "-zation", GB is "-sation". With a spell checker configured
> en_EN you will have it mixed up. In German we have similar problems with

With a spell checker configured with en_EN, you will have nothing as
no such locale exists..:-)

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Daniel Burrows

2004-06-29, 5:59 pm

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 09:02:44PM +0200, Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> was heard to say:
> John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> wrote:
>
> Off topic - but what was the familiar form? I always thought that "you"
> was the familiar form, while "Thee"/"Thou" is the old-fashioned, formal
> one ("Thy kingdom come, thy will be done..." (Lord's Prayer) or "Shall I
> compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more
> temperate..." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)).

Actually, "Thee/Thou" was the *informal* form -- it only sounds formal
nowadays because most people only encounter it in school (Shakespeare)
and church (King Jimmy).

Daniel

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-30, 3:38 am

Quoting Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org):

> I agree about correct grammar, but whether familiarity is
> "unprofessional" is language-dependent, I feel. I've never found it to
> be a problem in English.

At the minimum, English does not have the tu/vous or du/Sie
problem. Lucky people...:-)

At this time, as a matter of fact, using these familiar ways to speak
to people *is* perceived as unprofessionnal quality.

Just let me take a reference I often use even though some people
around won't like it_: Microsoft Windows localisation. I thinks that
most serious people (I mean people which are grown up enough and
forget about "MiKroSofT Suckz") will agree that MS Windows
localisation is quite professionnal and generally well written
(generally.....I have counter examples for French, but very few) and,
geesh, I daily work with MS Windows, blame me.

I have never ever seen any MS Windows screen use the 2nd singular
person when translating "you blahblah".....never.

I'm pretty this is exactly the same for German, Italian and all other
languages which have this dual way to address people when talking to
them (bu the way, this is actually a daily problem in normal life_:
should I say "tu" or "vous" to this guy_?)

This leads me to a more general consideration_: I have written
scientific papers for years and years before I turned bad and started
working in computer science. I still work in a scientific institution
and daily interact with scientists.

Scientific papers writing is a very special way of writing, by using a
very neutral language (never use 1st person, be factual, never use
exclamation marks, large use of passive form).

Indeed, in good documentation AND in user interaction in our software,
I have found that the best written screens or documentations are the
ones which use these concepts we use in scientific papers writing.

And, also, sometimes learning lessons from MS Windows is not that
bad. The French team sometimes refers to MS Windows ways to translate
things. And this ends up in not that bad work....

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-30, 3:38 am

Quoting Christian Perrier (bubulle@debian.org):
>
> <troll size="huge">There is a conspiracy against translators and
> translation teams</troll>

Funnily, the RANT finaly turned into a very interesting discussion
about different translation cultures...:-)

Again a long discussion in -devel which does not turn into a flame
war.

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-30, 3:38 am

Quoting Frank Küster (frank@debian.org):

> Microsoft. The question is, of course, whether we limit our target
> audience too much if we restrict it to people that feel part of the Free
> Software Community. At least for interactions with users we shouldn't

I think that, yes, we limit the audience too much when restricting to
people that feel part of the FS community.

Custom Debian Distributions come to my mind and more generally world
domination plans....:-)

But this does not force us to use "Sie/vous" in our mailing lists/geek
events and so on, of course. I would never say "Ich danke Sie" to a
fellow german DD, of course..even not to a swiss DD...(<huge grin> )

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Andreas Metzler

2004-06-30, 7:51 am

Helmut Wollmersdorfer <helmut.wollmersdorfer@gmx.at> wrote:
[...]
> Geben _Sie_ _Ihr_ Kennwort ein.
> [EN:~ Enter your password.]

> Thus, current WinXP (DE) uses second person in the polite form. And it
> is written with beginning capital letter, which is only usual in formal
> Letters, and would be a little bit old fashioned in email.
[...]

Not unless you do not use upper case in e-mail at all. The form of
address "Sie" (and the corresponding possessive pronoun "Ihr") is
always capitalized. (The personal pronoun "sie" is not.)

You are mixing this up with du/ihr (dein/euer) which _was_ capitalized
*only* in letters until 1996 when the "neue deutsche Rechtschreibung"
was introduced.
cu andreas
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Recai Oktas

2004-06-30, 7:51 am

* Christian Perrier [2004-06-30 07:48:53+0200]
[...]
> At the minimum, English does not have the tu/vous or du/Sie
> problem. Lucky people...:-)

Well, same problem (?) with Turkish as 'sen/siz' :-)

> At this time, as a matter of fact, using these familiar ways to speak
> to people *is* perceived as unprofessionnal quality.
>
> Just let me take a reference I often use even though some people
> around won't like it_: Microsoft Windows localisation. I thinks that
> most serious people (I mean people which are grown up enough and
> forget about "MiKroSofT Suckz") will agree that MS Windows
> localisation is quite professionnal and generally well written
> (generally.....I have counter examples for French, but very few) and,
> geesh, I daily work with MS Windows, blame me.

AFAIK, Microsoft has been working with a special company here for
Turkish translations (not sure, but I guess the same company also works
on Apple MacOSX). I sometimes think if they could at least put a
dictionary like reference in public domain ;-) This could particularly
help to desktop (i.e. GNOME/KDE) localization teams.

[...]
> This leads me to a more general consideration_: I have written
> scientific papers for years and years before I turned bad and started
> working in computer science. I still work in a scientific institution
> and daily interact with scientists.
>
> Scientific papers writing is a very special way of writing, by using a
> very neutral language (never use 1st person, be factual, never use
> exclamation marks, large use of passive form).
>
> Indeed, in good documentation AND in user interaction in our software,
> I have found that the best written screens or documentations are the
> ones which use these concepts we use in scientific papers writing.

I fully agree. There are a lot of debconf strings which use 'we' or 'I'
(e.g. "I can configure this automatically ..."). During the translation
review stage, I try to correct it so as to speak a more neutral
language. Could it be a policy item stated in Debian policy, or
somewhere else?

--
roktas

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Thiemo Seufer

2004-06-30, 6:04 pm

Mike Hommey wrote:
[snip]
> I don't see which broad meaning EN:document would have that DE:Dokument
> wouldn't. The word EN:document had a meaning before computers. This
> meaning is, I guess the one that DE:Dokument gives.

DE:Dokument means an official paper of legal relevance. I always thought
the EN:document's meaning is a less strict one, but probably I'm just
mistaken about this one.

Thiemo

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-30, 6:04 pm

Colin Watson

2004-06-30, 6:04 pm

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 02:06:15AM +0900, Changwoo Ryu wrote:
> Yes, But some English messages are already too geeky to be translated
> for non-geeks..
>
> "Failed to dup()/wait3()", "Core dumped", "Failed to listen/bind a
> socket in function()"; even English natives don't understand what these
> mean without some Unix programming experiences. As a translator, I'd
> like to see more non-geek-friendly English msgids. There were no way
> to avoid clumsyness, while translating such messages.

On the other hand, those messages can be very useful in bug reports.
There's a balance to be struck here.

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Christian Perrier

2004-06-30, 6:04 pm

> I fully agree. There are a lot of debconf strings which use 'we' or 'I'
> (e.g. "I can configure this automatically ..."). During the translation
> review stage, I try to correct it so as to speak a more neutral
> language. Could it be a policy item stated in Debian policy, or
> somewhere else?

http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/dtsg/dtsg.txt

Now linked in the Developer's Corner.

Feel free to use this when dealing with improperly written debconf
templates (other very common case_: "if you answer Yes, blah blah")

Next step_: convert it to XML and have it included in the Develper's
Reference.

I (and several other french team members) already make bug reports
about "computer personnali(z|s)ation" when I find some occurrence AND
when I have enough courage (most often this happens in cases several
other rewrites are needed for other very common mistakes).

We already have a kind of reference as the Policy already ask avoiding
this in init scripts, IIRC.

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Nicolas Bertolissio

2004-07-01, 7:50 am

Le jeudi 1 juillet 2004, Miles Bader écrit :
> Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
>
> They are just labels, which people learn the meaning of in context.
> For error messages, this wouldn't be so good, but for this usage, it's fine.

Sorry, I don't agree.

These are label but have no meaning for a non-english speaker, so they
have to be translated. This is at least the way we do things in French.
For an english speaker this is a label with a meaning, so we try to find
French words to express the same idea so someone who has never used a
computer can understand what it is without having to learn the original
version, to try to make it's own understanding of it and to mentally
translated it each time it encounter these words.

When I read French articles in magazines with untranslated "kernel",
"driver", "device" and so on words, I have to translated them in French
mentally so I would prefer to read the whole article in English, or in
French but not with thoses mixed things.

Regards

Nicolas Bertolissio
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Christian Perrier

2004-07-01, 5:59 pm

Quoting Nicolas Bertolissio (nico.bertol-no-spam@free.fr):

> When I read French articles in magazines with untranslated "kernel",
> "driver", "device" and so on words, I have to translated them in French
> mentally so I would prefer to read the whole article in English, or in
> French but not with thoses mixed things.

I basically agree with Nico, at least for written language.

When it comes to spoken language, things vary a lot:

-I most often use "driver" than "pilote"
-I very rarely "kernel" but most often "noyau"
-I never use "device" but "périphérique"

However, we certainly agree that we translate "a device driver in the
kernel" by "un pilote de périphérique dans le noyau" in all our work.

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Marc Haber

2004-07-03, 7:00 pm

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 18:13:32 +0200, Christian Perrier
<bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
>I basically agree with Nico, at least for written language.
>
>When it comes to spoken language, things vary a lot:

I usually write the same way I speak, using the English expression
usually if the German version has a meaning in everyday life. For
example, I say "Treiber" for the english "driver", but "kernel"
instead of "Kern".

Other things, like "file system" as "Dateisystem" habe evolved over
time and I simply say what everyone says.

There are some expressions I refuse to use. I never say "DMZ" although
everybody else says that when they mean "perimeter network",
translated "Grenznetz".

Greetings
Marc

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Colin Watson

2004-07-05, 2:50 am

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 11:18:18AM +0900, Clemens Schwaighofer wrote:
> Mathieu Roy wrote:
> | For instance, around Geneva, they have a weird name for what we call
> | "rond point" in France.
> | Well, I forgot the English name of it; you find a "rond
> | point" when two roads are crossing and look like :
> | |
> | ---O---
> | |
>
> Thats a around-about

IIRC

"roundabout"

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Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]

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