<i18n dev> Newbie questions

[Jiri Vanek]

On 01/31/2013 11:25 AM, 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
>
> 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)
>
> Also you probably noticed that already, but just to be sure - a part of the file has restrictions
> for the length of the string (check "Boot options" part in the Messages.properties file). This might
> complicate the translation a bit :-)
>
> Greetings,
> Alexandr
>

Just small addition. Several corrupted entries  were fixed yesterday, so maybe update to your *_DE 
translations will be needed - see http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea-web/rev/1648b9f9cddf

Also from developer perspective the only need is encoding and line-endings.
All lines should end by LF as linux do and not by CR LF as windows do. Also encoding utf-8 (and not 
windows' iso)  have to be kept.
I should write this to you probably earlier :(,

sincerely sorry.
   J.