Forum .LRN Q&A: Edit vs Rename vs Properties

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Posted by Alfred Werner on
In running through the translations for Russian and Japanese I've come to the conclusion that we overuse the word EDIT to describe the action on a particular node, when in fact we are either performing a Rename or Properties action.

Just food for thought ...

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2: Nuke, Spam, and Rebuild? (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on
I would not object to you using the translation tool to make such minor changes to the English version right now Alfred.

Peter?

It may put the translations slightly out of sync, but they will line up with time (and eventually we might be able to get the translation tools to flag changes to the source language). A brutal way of making sure they stay in sync is adding a nuke button to the EN_US version (You say the source language has been terrorized Mr. President? You can wipe out all translations, by pressing this button Sir. Then the spam engine will kick in and all embedded translators will be electronically informed to check translation interfaces for missing message keys so they can help rebuild their respective linguistic cultural heritages based on our ideals Sir).

😉

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Posted by Peter Marklund on
I have no objections to making such a change either.

I've come to realize that multilinguality requires more clarity in the phrases of the language you are translating from. I really empathize with the translators who are struggling to translate sloppy hacker speak that is not only cryptic but also out of context...

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Posted by Alfred Werner on
So - just edit the English tags when I see confusing / imprecise terminology - righto. FWIW I was a translator for 3 years .. then I discovered that our system was a PDP-7 running Unix and never looked back :)

Actually the experience was good - I've been able to do a bit of internationalization work since those good old days!

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Posted by Matthias Melcher on
Alfred,

where are your changes documented? We cannot expect 206 translators to do CVS diff checking against the message catalogs in order to keep track of their own terminological consistency.

It is great that the fact is now being recognized that "translating sloppy hacker speak" can significantly improve overall usability by discovering bad English original wording. But they must not be withdrwan just like a carpet from under the translators' feet.
(My two Eurocents in bad English).

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Posted by Alfred Werner on
What changes? I'm just keeping notes at the moment. I realize and understand your concern. With no tracking I don't intend to do changes to the base keys. I plan on getting the entire Russian catalog translated before re-addressing this issue. That way, I'll have a more comprehensive perspective.
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Posted by Alfred Werner on
Just to clarify / amplify - I think there is a general lack of  consistency in how we use jargon in the system. In addition to the 'team player' reason given above, I think a large number of terms will disappear once we create the 'common' terms in the acs-kernel and perhaps modify the keys slightly to take advantage. A lot of the terminology in the system was designed to feel colloquial/laid-back/non-stuffy which unfortunately doesn't translate well.

I'm working in Russian and Japanese to make sure I get a fairly broad perspective grammatically before making recommendations. There will always be challenging phrases - a good example in Russian is that some number of nouns change their ending based on the LAST DIGIT of the preceding number, so 1 year, 21 year, 1001 year, nnn[234] year-a, and
a new noun entirely (lyet) if the last digit is 5-9 (well 5 to zero technically). The trick in these cases is to invert word order to avoid such nuisances.

So in other words, what I hope to do is just keep good notes as I go through an entire language - maybe two, so when it's time to redo the english keys and create the common key structure in the acs-kernel, I'll actually know what I'm talking about. I'm hoping that other translators do the same so when it's time to caucus about how to fix the system we have a good dialog. I've been posting my basic thoughts (like ITEM is a vague term) in the forums because it's better than just letting it sit on a scrap of paper here.

In the meantime, I'm being careful but not fussy about what I translate. I think every one of us who takes on a language will have to go back and make all the phrasing consistent after a first pass anyway.

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8: Merging message keys (response to 7)
Posted by Anja Wicht on
(This is a bit out of context, but I didn't want to open an extra thread):

This refers to Alfred Werner's suggestion 'Four messages to merge?' in the Bugtracker: https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/bug?bug_number=973

Please be very careful about this. It might make sense - or not. You can only find this out if you know the precise context of the phrase in the UI (and comparable other phrases... e.g. Is it a heading? How are other headings structured? etc.). Simply searching for redundant messages in the listings and merging them is dangerous.
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9: Re: Merging message keys (response to 8)
Posted by Alfred Werner on
Agreed - but I'm not on dotLRN - just asking someone who does use it to make that decision for me.