On Sat, 17 May 2003, Martin Schulze wrote: > Please keep in mind that a translation is a translation and not a > redesign or reformat. When translating documents and strings, you
True. But the Debian translators are trying to l10n Debian, not to translate it. And l10n *includes* redesign, reformat, and just about everything the i18n structure of the program/documentation/system allows one to do in order to make it stick to *all* the conventions of a locale. And the better the i18n structure, the MORE you can change when doing l10n. And those conventions DO include layout, style, grammar... not just language. > should always try to stay as close to the original as you can. Changing > the text layout is a NO-GO in my opinion - and in the opinion of our > Apache people apparently. Apparently. We are trying to bring to light that proper l10n requires more than that. Oh, obviously this requires that the DDTP data makes it to inside the deb, and that maintainers have a "update-from-ddtp" tool that fetches all l10n data in there, updates it for all locales (this DOES include adding new ones, and trashing deprecated ones). That way, the maintainer can (as often as he has time to do so) get the full view of his package in all locales. Users would still get the up-to-date data from the DDTP (if they wish so), or the one in the package (especially for stable releases), at their choice. When contention arrises, we talk it out such as what is being done for the apache case. Is it different from what we do now? Certainly. Is it better? Well, IMHO it is MUCH better if we indeed are trying to make Debian universal. Will it work? I am not sure, but I am willing to try. Too bad I don't have time to code the tools. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
