Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Sometimes an English short package description is a proper name, explaining
> everything for the native speaker. Or the SD contains the proper name,
> explaining the acronym.
That is, things like "yaga: Yet Another Generic App"? The expanded
form there isn't strictly the name of the package, though it may be
something that's equally prominent on the project website. (Or I
suppose in fact the DD might have packaged it under a name that's more
abbreviated than the "official" brandname, but I don't know of any
examples.)
The problem for translators being that a translation of the expansion
is unlikely to spell out the same thing.
> If the SD is not translated, the information-seeking user could expect an
> English description. But he can throw the name into the search engine.
>
> * If the SD is translated, this can be helpful for the inexperienced user.
> * If the SD ist translated, it might be harder to consult a search engine or
> Wikipedia.
I'm not sure I follow. Can you give some examples of software that
has a Wikipedia entry for the expansion and not for the acronym?
> What is your team's procedure in such cases? What is the advice of *the*
> native linguist? (I believe that sometime ago he had already answered this
> question :_()
I can't believe I answered it, unless "yes, that sounds really
problematic" counts. Sometimes you can afford to move why-the-name
hints into the long description - that is,
gland: Gnome Local Area Network Daemon
GLAND is a daemon compliant with RFC 1138, which [...]
becomes
gland: vicinity intranet server for GNOME
GLAND ("Gnome Local Area Network Daemon") is a daemon compliant
with RFC 1138, which [...]
but it's always an extra difficult judgement call.
Of course sometimes the anglophone monoglot readers aren't the ones at
an advantage - see the long description of sympa for an example that
spends a whole paragraph explaining the name. (And like my
hypothetical case above it still doesn't actually explain the double
meaning.)
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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