Hi,

2017-01-25 8:47 GMT-08:00 mathieu stumpf guntz psychoslave@culture-libre.org:

Well, I have a similar difficulty to interpret this message: "2016 Wikimedia Foundation Leadership Team Retreat"

In this case, it's "a retreat of the leadership team of the Wikimedia Foundation that happened in 2016". The "leadership team" usually means the C-level staff.

I would be curious to know if other translators feel sometime blocked when they meet such a long juxtaposed words and if they have some tricks to get around this difficulty.

Also is there somewhere where we could feedback a need for formulation using more prepositions in official documents published by WMF? I don't know if it would feel more "pedantic" or "uncommon" for most English natives, but surely it might help – at least me – in translation.

I've added a note to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Manual#Guidelines because that's the only place I know that includes that kind of recommendations. Feel free to add it to other places.

Le 25/01/2017 à 20:35, Wiegand Alice a écrit :

Thanks, Guillaume! I'm glad that Mathieu raised these question. We (WMF) have to be sensitive and careful with our wording with respect to translations. Being an international organization I would be happy to see us always use a standard set of defined terms, short sentences and standard grammar, which is much more difficult than expected. And sadly I know exactly what I’m talking about. Thanks for raising awareness again!

Thank you Alice for you support.

For the "standard set of defined terms" I think that there already an ongoing effort https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151766 around glossaries led by Trizek.

I'm currently gathering a set of term I find particularly recurrent within my translation activities to Esperanto. It departed from two wish I have:

* translating the Perligata documentation https://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:Lingua::Romana::Perligata#Selektoj_dum_traduko to Esperanto; * having a more consistent translation term set for Mediawiki.

The last one is led by observations of the various translations used for the same original term (for exemple, "block (someone)" which might be translated as "bloki" (to obstruct with a block) or "forbari" (to bar away). So the idea is to identify this duplicates, and at some point make a request for feedback from the community about what terms should be preferred, although in some cases I do have a strong preference (like "forbari"), and make a dedicated pass aiming at using homogeneous vocabulary after that.

Also as I began to translate more documentation "current affairs" on Meta, I added more terms related to Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia governance.

Of course this plan doesn't resolve the use of synonym in the source strings, like "delete/efface/erase/remove/suppress". There are habits which are more or less consistent, like you "drop" objects of databases (due to the SQL command), but as far as I now there is no official respective usage recommendations for the previous ones. So even if we make (when possible) a clear distinctive one-to-one correspondence for each synonym, there is no guarantee that it is really meaningful (which also make the UX slightly less consistent).

Currently I focus on the gathering task focused on the Esperanto translation, but later I would like to make this more generic, using some centralized structured data set which gather terms and short definitions in multiple languages. So far I didn't looked in detail how it would make a good match or not, but may structured data set on Commons might be used for that, I'm just afraid that it would make translation harder as, as far as I know, the Translation extension doesn't support that kind of input and asking translators to edit Lua code isn't really appropriate.

Ok, I think I'll stop here, as this email begin to be rather long and is probably by now completely out of topic. :P

Alice.

...

Am 25.01.2017 um 18:02 schrieb Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier@wikimedia.org mailto:gpaumier@wikimedia.org>:

Hi,

2017-01-25 8:47 GMT-08:00 mathieu stumpf guntz <psychoslave@culture-libre.org mailto:psychoslave@culture-libre.org>:

...

Well, I have a similar difficulty to interpret this message: "2016 Wikimedia Foundation Leadership Team Retreat"

In this case, it's "a retreat of the leadership team of the Wikimedia Foundation that happened in 2016". The "leadership team" usually means the C-level staff.

...

I would be curious to know if other translators feel sometime blocked when they meet such a long juxtaposed words and if they have some tricks to get around this difficulty.

Also is there somewhere where we could feedback a need for formulation using more prepositions in official documents published by WMF? I don't know if it would feel more "pedantic" or "uncommon" for most English natives, but surely it might help – at least me – in translation.

I've added a note to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Manual#Guidelines because that's the only place I know that includes that kind of recommendations. Feel free to add it to other places.

-- Guillaume Paumier

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On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 12:14 AM, mathieu stumpf guntz psychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:

Le 25/01/2017 à 18:02, Guillaume Paumier a écrit :

...

In this case, it's "a retreat of the leadership team of the Wikimedia Foundation that happened in 2016". The "leadership team" usually means the C-level staff.

Thank you Guillaume, that it far more clear to my mind and should be far enough for translating the string. :)

Now, admittedly I have no idea what's a C-level staff might be. But it looks like there are some pages matching the string on meta so I might have a look at it later. However it seems there is no match for A-level, B-lever, D-level, or Z-level, let alone Ω-level. ^^

C-level or C-suite refers to the people with "Chief" in their title, or at that equivalent (top) level in an organization’s structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_title#Senior_management :-)