Re: first file to work on!

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <alarfaj0 at yahoo dot com>]

Progress report:

Although kbabel (0.9.6) seems to be working fine on my
box, & I can view Arabic text correctly, I still can't
type it on any programs except katoob. Writing in
katoob then pasting to kbabel didn't work either. So
in the end I was working with katoob alone, using
kbabel only in the rough translation phase and also
for translation database suggestions. I won't put any
more effort into solving this problem as I will be
upgrading to Mandrake 10 soon.

Now then, after the rough translation by kbabel, I've
translated approximately 80 entries by hand so far,
but I can only voucher the 100% correctness of only
about 50 of them. The rest are fuzzified. I have a few
questions (you knew this was coming didn't you?) :)

1. There are words which have either completely
stumped me, or I wasn't satisfied that suggestions
made by kbabel were appropriate to the conext of an
instant messenger like Gossip. Among these words:
Smiley, Graphics, home (does it mean house? or home
directory?), User ID etc... Any ideas?

2. Some English sentences just don't make any sense or
are grammatically incomplete. Sentences such as:"could
not connect" & "contact not online". Should the
translations to these sentences also be three-legged
or do I have the right to write better sentences?

3. This isn't a question, but there are English words
that -when said- have no relation in meaning to the
individual parts that form them. Words such as
"startup", "online", "offline" etc... The words we
currently use for them are rather stilted, unnatural,
or uncreative (and this is my opinion as a user, not a
translator). Are we allowed to try and coin new Arabic
words for such English words?

4. Should I try to stick as much as I can to
word-for-word translation and to keeping the structure
of the sentence intact? I noticed that some sentences
which appear weak in English can become more natural
and even more expressive in Arabic if their structure
is changed a little. One example is:
"Contact information for %s"
I could translate this, keeping structure intact as:
"ma3loomat al-murasil Li %s"
or I could shorten it, making it more natural:
"ma3loomat al-murasil %s"
What is the project standard on this one?

For your benifit I have attached the file. If the work
is satisfactory please commit it to CVS for me. If
not, I'll be sure to remedy all the mistakes before
continuing with the translation. Sorry for making this
too long :)

Salam to all,

Abdulaziz.

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