Re: Re: <i18n dev> Newbie questions

[Jacob Wisor]

"skolnag at gmail.com"<skolnag at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > --- Regarding the translation; Did you follow any policy or guide while
> > translating to cz? I was not sure how close to stay to the en original. I
> > tried to stay as close as possible rather then doing a more semanticly
> > oriented translation. What is the preferred policy on that?
> >
> > This is answer from Alexandr (CCed) who created cz transaltion:
> >
> > " Hello, as far as I know there is no style guide or policy. I tried to
> > stay as close to the source
> > text as possible. But of course I adapted the sentence structure etc., so
> > that it reads naturally in
> > Czech and according to context (instruction for users x description of a
> > feature, etc.). In some
> > cases the meaning wasn't very clear. Then I contacted the software
> > developers for clarifying. In
> > some cases the meaning turned out to be quite different from the original
> > source text, so I
> > recommend to ask whenever you are not sure about anything."---
> >
> > Hello,
> 
> May be a few more comments, that might be helpful. Generally, if no
> specific style guide si provided, it is mostly good to follow Microsoft
> style guide, which is de facto standard for IT translations, is very useful
> and is mostly used in professional IT translations. The MS style guides can
> be downloaded here:
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/StyleGuides.aspx

I have read those documents on de and pl. They are quite okay, but they are soked, in some cases, with Microsoft's sales policy all too much. I'd say, I agree up to about 90% with the pl document and only 50% with the de document. The main problem with the de document is that though it is trying to improve on the previous German style it fails to do so in a stringent and reasonable way, partly probably because no German-speaking country has an official institution or agency to conserve and/or develop the German language. It touches many legitimate areas of concern, but it also contradicts them with their answers. For example, while the document states that during the last few years even more anglicisms (among them some really bad) have found their way into the language, the authors forgot that it was actually them who had strongly contributed to that trend. The reason for this is that Microsoft's German localizers either have been lazy or had no time to come up with good tra!
 nslations. Well, probably the later was the case. So, instead of revising the old style they were just trying to apply some minor fixes in some areas and thus made an ever greater mess. They have probably spoken to the wrong people or have been advised by the wrong people, or they just did not want to introduce major changes in their product language because the customers got used to mediocre quality terms and translations. I do not know if they did or did not, but they should have spoken to Bastian Sick or read his books "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod" (loosely translated "The Dative Makes The Genitive Die"). Many German-speakers who care about the language probably know what I am talking about. So after all, the de document is not that much of a help.
 
> With regard to terminology, I mostly followed suggestions from Open-Tran.eu
> (http://open-tran.eu/ ; terminology as used in several important open
> source projects) and/or Microsoft glossaries (
> http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Default.aspx)

Thank you for these links, they indeed come in handy.
 
Regards,
Jacob