Re: About Terminology + After having revised GNOME andKDEterminology

["Youcef Rabah Rahal" <yrrahal42 at hotmail dot com>]

Salam Hafid,

The issues you are enumerating are really important, nothing new here ;) 
Very unfortunately, I am really busy for the next coming month so I won't be 
able to discuss these issues thoroughly.

1- About names, I don't see a problem in keeping them in latin characters.

2- About consistency, well... This problem comes and goes periodically. That 
would be great if we could sit, discuss and find a solution once for all... 
I have already raised this issue almost one year ago, and I did not get a 
real satisfying solution. You can take a look at this thread:

http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/doc/2002/December/msg00017.html

(follow it 'till february 2003....:)

I faced this problem while developing Bayani, but it IS a general problem in 
Arabic translations. So, I did get 2 books (1 for computer science, 1 for 
math+astro) edited by a department of the Arab League. The people there have 
made a good effort to standardize terminology around the Arab world. So I 
based my translations on these books, first for Bayani, and then for the 
translation of QT and KDE and some other stuff. While translating KDE, I 
tried to use as often as I could those books and I modified the former 
translations to fit with the standards. Still, there ARE 2 problems:

a- Some (many?) of the terms used in the books are outdated (except for the 
math and astro ones which are rather fine). Some of them are weird ;) So it 
becomes useless to put them and hope a user will understand their meaning in 
an interface...

b- As far as I know, I am the ONLY person inside Arabeyes who has those 
books. So unless I work 24h a day on ALL translations (KDE, GNOME etc) I 
don't see a practical way to make them profitable to all translators... By 
the way, I stopped working on KDE since I started to have very little spare 
time... I may come back one again to it to give it one or two hours a week.

I believe that the work you did to standardize the translations is really 
the panacea (this assessment is based on what I saw on your posts, not on 
the zip file ;). Because it is based on practice and discussions and 
compliation from many sources etc. I am sure people will have 
critics/questions/suggestions/remarls/etc about some of the translations 
etc, but this is inevitable and hopefully constructive (I sure will give 
some remarks ;). What I suggest is that you use your 
in-progress-and-constant-evolution-dictionnary to continue KDE and GNOME 
translations and try to revize and standardize the existing translations  
(see that with the coordinators)... The initial plan, if I remember well, 
was to translate as much as we could, then make a second (and third?) pass 
to standardize everything (due to multiple translators etc). So, since the 
helping hands are few and we're running out of time, maybe the 
standardardization should be done directly in the first pass.

I also suggest to see with the wordlist guys a possible merge of your 
dictionary with wordlist. I don't see an issue in having technical terms 
inside an online dictionary. I also think that the natural evolution of 
wordlist-qamoose is to have an english-arabic-english dictionaries, plus 
french, spanish etc etc.

The final translation terms could even be submitted to the Arab League for 
inclusion in their dictionnaries...

Sorry for the long email and not answering you in Arabic (for practical 
reasons).

Salam all,

Youcef.

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Search, le moteur de recherche qui pense comme vous !  
http://search.msn.fr/