discussing the QAC rule - acronyms

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

My previous experience in translations is turned to be fruitful to me. Many of 
the things which I haven't been able to take a decision about have been clear 
to me now. I want to share my experience here with you.

I made my choices of what's the best way to  handle many issues. I would like 
to discuss these things here if you don't mind changing what have been stated 
before if convinced.

First, we agree together that QAC's role is to provide quality and consistent 
translation, right?

Consistency is the point I want to stress here.

I will begin with acronyms. I am strongly in favor of leaving those as they 
are without trying to type them in Arabic letters. KDE should never be 
translated as كي دي إي nor as كيدي. ِA professional translator in our team, 
has mentioned that official and certified translation deal with them 
like this. He mentioned a lot of stuff regarding United Nations translation 
standard (IIRC).


I searched the web and found many projects points to this, e.g.:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/doc/translation-new-words

Transliteration will get the translators in problems regarding how is it 
pronounced and also space-fitting issues. The first will carry a lot of 
unnecessary discussion of what's the correct pronounciation and the lator 
would force the translator to know the context and decide whether the space 
allowed for the msgstr will suffice. Besides being difficult, it would cause 
inconsistency which is very bad and unprofessional.

Let's see to which extent we can agree together ;)

-- 
Munzir Taha  PGP Key available
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Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Linux Registered User #279362 at http://counter.li.org
Mandrake Club member
Maintainer of the Open Arabic Bugs Project at
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS
New Horizons CLC
Riyadh, SA