[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: french translations, first pass, some questions, first cleanup

[Andreas Ericsson]

Yves Mettier wrote:
>>From: Ton Voon <tonvoon at mac.com>
>>Subject: Re: [Nagiosplug-devel] french translations, first pass, some questions, first
>>cleanup
>>Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 23:08:36 +0000
>>To: Benoit Mortier <benoit.mortier at opensides.be>
> 
> 
> Here's my opinion about those 2 questions :
> 
> 
>>- Are copyright messages (eg "Copyright (c) 2000-2003 Nagios Plugin
>>Development Team") normally not translated?
> 
> 
> Yes do translate them !
> 
> This is legal mention. If you had to go to justice, and if the message is not
> translated, probably many countries will just say "we don't understand that. Please
> translate to our language if you want that we consider your case".
> So the answer is : yes !
> 

On the contrary, the answer is no. A copyright notice can be disregarded 
because it's mistranslated, but international copyright law states that 
copyright notices should be interpreted in the language native to the 
copyright holder. Different translators with legal expertise will be 
called to do the translation unless the parties agree to what it mean. 
That's why every translation of the GNU GPL always refer to the english 
version of itself in legal matters (read more on www.gnu.org about that).

> Why are you asking why this should be translated or not ? Just because you don't trust
> the person who translates. I can understand that. But if you don't trust him/her, just
> refuse their translation (how could you notice that "alert" or "critical" or such
> messages are not translated with bad words ?)
> 
> So trust the translator and let him/her translate the copyright mention.
> Well, that's my opinion.
> 
> 
> 
>>- Short help only need "usage" translated? If the full help is
>>translated, shouldn't the options in short help match?
> 
> 
> Make the difference between messages and commands.
> $ ls --help
>   -A, --almost-all           ne pas inclure dans la liste . et ..
> 
> -A and --almost-all are commands. "ne pas inclure dans la liste . et .." is text.
> 
> Translate messages, and leave commands as is.
> 

This is The Gnu Way, so that's what will be done according to the 
developer conventions.

> This is the same for shell or SQL commands that should not be translatable. The worse
> part is when you have html :
> 
> printf("<h1>title here</h1>") should not be internationalized as printf( _("<h1>title
> here</h1>") ) but like this :
> printf("<h1>%s</h1>", _("title here"))
> 

The translation can translate <h1> to <h1> if it wants to so that's a 
fairly silly point (although it would perhaps save the translator some 
typing work).

> Yves
> 

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer