Hi,
I've just finished the pt translation of the Bullseye manual using the
pt-PT po file as a base.
The difference between pt and pt-PT is not big, but using and revising
the po files with meld was a more useful task than what I've initially
thought.
The pt-PT translation was made on hosted.weblate intensively using the
machine translation suggestions feature, both by myself and an other
translator. This is a great feature, but it has its own drawbacks.
Firstly, many machine translations are too much literal word by word
translations, which makes that some texts/sentences do not get
properly translated. Then, some words in some Linux commands get
translated as well. For instance, in «debian-edu-ltsp-install --arch
amd64 --diskless_workstation no thin_type bare» the bit "bare" at the
end got translated to "nu"; the same in «debian-edu-ltsp-install
--diskless_workstation yes» where "yes" became "sim". Spotting all
the issues arising from machine translations while translating making
use of a tool like weblate is not an easy task - at least not for me.
The original text in English, itself, sometimes has its own issues.
People who master a given subject matter (of any type, in any
language) have difficulty in understanding the difficulties of the
layman at understanding the subject matter and the way things are
explained. This is not to say people are careless, it's just to say
that it's inevitable to a certain degree that people use the language,
jargon, speech abbreviation they're used to in their daily
communication. In the case, as an example, we have «you must have 2
network cards installed in a machine which is going to be installed»
instead of «you must have 2 network cards installed in a machine where
the system is going to be installed». The repetition of "installed"
and the way the idea is written (the machine being installed) makes
the sentence not immediately obvious for the layman and doesn't make
life easier for the translator who wants to provide a clear text to
the reader. We can also find the explanation «USB flash drives (also
known as "USB sticks")» which is for absolute beguinners, and «You can
use ... ... as an additional boot parameter» which is not for absolute
beguinners at all.
All this made me spend a lot more time revising the entire translation
than to produce a second version of the translation with the required
orthography changes.
I'll use the revision work I've done to revise the pt-PT version as well.
José Vieira
