[Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

[Gary Kirk]

I think what should be taken from all this is that translation
requests should be made and publicised *well* before the whatever
we're translating about happens - for stuff we know about obviously -
like the Fundraiser. 'The Fundraiser starts tomorrow' is not much
notice, is it?

On 12/22/06, habj <sweetadelaide at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/12/22, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com>:
>
> > I doubt that will make a difference, as I only used the notes that
> > were in English to help me.  Provided that a Thai dictionary, for
> > instance, has similar quality notes (and this is a good but not
> > exceptional dictionary) I see no reason why this should be impossible.
> >
> > Yes, a knowledge of the language and culture is helpful.  But it's not
> > completely impossible to manage without for these simple phrases.
>
> IMHO we are splitting hairs. Of course there exists lists of words
> that are simple enough that they can be translated with only a
> dictionary! (and some context, or you can not use the explanation and
> notes in your dictionary). The question is how common these cases are,
> and I'd say that partly depends on how afraid you are of silly
> mistakes. One might realise that when put in context, the simple word
> has the wrong grammatical form... since the language one translates
> from does not distinguish between these two etc. etc. ad nauseam.
>
> I've translated MediaWiki messages "blindly". It often worked OK, some
> had to be tweaked when we discovered where they were used. That was no
> big deal. In PR material, such as this fundraising stuff, silly
> mistakes look much worse. I think this discussion still somehow hovers
> around the topic of C.O.R.E. and to me it is clear that a translation
> with just a dictionary would be less satisfactory, so that correct
> English in most cases is a better alternative.
>
> /habj
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


-- 
Gary Kirk