Re: [doc] Arabic...

[Ahmad Gharbeia <gharbeia at gmail dot com>]

I think you should go ahead with assuming responsibility for translating
Pidgin, Abdelrahman

Khaled and I had reviewed and translated Pidgin, other tools in 2008 as
part of our work on the Security in-a-box toolkit, including mozilla's
Firefox and Thunderbird, Tor's Vidalia, KeePass, TrueCrypt and others.

Some of these were later messed up again: e.g. Vidalia.

>From what I remember we had to do much work in order to fix issues
similar to what Abdelrahman is specifically addressing. Pidgin
translation was full of out-right semantically -wrong translations. I
wonder if any of these are left or were later re-introduced!

I'm still interested in the general area of localisation, and I'm doing
work in other projects, but I don't think I will go back to Pidgin soon.

I'm also keenly interested in issues pertaining to technical writing and
localisation in the area of security and privacy. So please feel free to
raise issues and tell me what you think about specific examples, if you
feel like.

As for *imperative on UI elements that perform actions*, well, that was
a campaign I started around 10 years ago now, and I'm all for it. It was
a steep climb to effect this change and make it acceptable in the FOSS
localisation community. I thought we had fixed Pidgin with that regard,
but I cannot be sure since it's been a while.

There we also other stylistic matters concerned with the structure and
voice of messages; for example using direct passive voice "المبني
للمجهول" instead of the construct "تم + المصدر", when appropriate, as
well as reducing the over-politeness, and other issues.

Also in work work we aimed to standardise a set of security-related
terms that are precise, indicative and unambiguous, over all other
criteria such as popularity. So we used "تعمية", "استيثاق", "ولوج" among
others, and synchronised that with the terminology used in the SiaB kit
and in other material we're involved in the creation of.

Here's a glossary we produced then:
https://securityinabox.org/ar/glossary

And there's always the wiki.arabeyes.org where you'll find Khaled, me,
and others willing to help and discuss solutions.


Good luck Abdelrahman and everyone,
Ahmad Gharbeia


رسالة Richard Laager في 11 أبر, 2014 م 10:28:
> Khaled Hosny,
> 
> Are you still translating Pidgin? It looks like the translation hasn't
> been updated since 2008, though I wrote commit messages from 2011
> referencing communications with you.
> 
> On Fri, 2014-04-11 at 19:31 +0200, Abdelrahman Ayman wrote:
>> i can clearly see that pidgin Arabic translation team is Inactive, and
>> that the Arabic in pidgin REALLY NEEDS TO BE FULLY REVIEWED because it
>> contains lots of wrong and literal translations not to mention the
>> outdated standards that were proven wrong.
>> for example they used Infinitive in some strings and Imperative in
>> some others. while they should have used Imperative in all of the
>> strings.
>>
>> i can't use that translation :( i tried but i couldn't, i can't
>> understand a word,actually no one can! it's too literal.
>>
>> anyway, i collected a small team of 2 Volunteers, (so that makes us 3)
>> to translate pidgin,and if we succeed, then it will be followed by
>> Empathy
>> so how to get the translation Permissions؟؟
>