On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Is it the case that the translation ready strings with the word "media" are not accompanied by comments which would aid the translator to select the best specific word from a candidate list?
It's not really about translation. It's about English as well. In translation it's usually clear how to translate this word without a lot of context explanation, and in the languages that I know, it's translated as "media" transliterated to that alphabet.
The part I had snipped from your original email seemed to indicate that the concern was lack of translation context. It would now seem that translation context isn't the big issue.
The problem is that "media" is (or at least appears to me to be) a technical engineering term that is not understood well by all users of Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites, whereas "pictures", "videos" and "sound recording" are unambiguous and don't need any explanation.
The layering of "technical engineering meaning" to 'media' is a context based usage. It would perhaps be natural to desire that the generic/catch-all nature of 'media' be clearly articulated and specified as 'pictures' (is that photographs?), 'videos' etc - in short, the pieces from RFC6838