ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 20:47 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:

> You should talk to some translators to make sure this
> is really how they would prefer to work. It certainly
> does make it easier to manage changes, but it can come
> at the cost of quality. Sometimes the best translations
> for a passage involve combining (and even re-ordering)
> sentences.

I think a fixed per paragraph scope is too strict and potentially too
long (though simplicity speaks for it). Per sentence will not work in
some cases, as with a  good translation, you might well end up with a
different number of sentences.

Translators should be able to mark spans of text to then translate them,
so we would end up with a collection of pairs of arbitrary length spans
for each source and target language combination.

There should also be a mechanism for translating fixed, single terms the
same way, once for an entire body of text (if not the entire pool).
Maybe that could be done with overlapping spans, so both text passages
and single words within could be marked and associated with specific
translations. The same mechanism could handle repeated sentences or
sentence fragments, then.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/