Re: Translation of manuals (was: SES manual French translation)

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 3, 2024, at 22:06, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2024 20:38:27 -0800
>> Cc: vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>>>> Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 13:51:38 +0000
>>>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
>>>> Cc: Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>, stefankangas@gmail.com, 
>>>> emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
>>>> 
>>>>> I meant markers specifically for translators, so that it would be easy
>>>>> to detect chunk(s) of text that was/were modified, and update their
>>>>> translations.
>>>> 
>>>> Don't you think that would be a bit burdensome for authors? Or do you
>>>> mean semi-automatically?
>>> 
>>> If there are markers, then finding the chunks whose translations
>>> should be updated could be scripted, yes.  It could be done with an
>>> Emacs Lisp program, for example.
>> 
>> A "chunk" here means something like a sentence, or even smaller.  It is
>> therefore impractical to add such markers to the source text.
> 
> If chunks were sentences, that would be impractical, indeed.  But I
> very much doubt that this is a good idea for translating manuals
> (message catalogs use short phrases because most messages in programs
> are themselves short phrases or single sentences).  Translating a
> sentence out of its context is much harder than translating a whole
> paragraph, because different languages have different ways of
> explaining technical issues, and a good translation might well require
> rearrange or rewrite sentences.

Indeed. But “marking” sentences does not mean that they can’t be 
translated by using different structures. A practical example for that 
is when translating 2 sentences with one sentence with two parts 
separated by a comma.

Also, translating a sentence never happens out of its context. There is 
the sentence before and the sentence after and all are visually present 
during the translation. So it’s easy for the translator to take the 
context into account.

There are some sentences that will take a wholly different meaning 
depending on the context, but such sentences are usually short 
*and* less attached to the context, so they do need special treatment. 
But that’s considered during the translation process.

I understand that you have some translating experience, but I am not 
sure that we see the same issues.

> So my initial thinking was that whole paragraphs, and sometimes more,
> should be marked as a unit.  And that is much more practical than
> marking short phrases or single sentences.

I’m not sure I understand what kind of marks you envision. Paragraphs 
are already marked by surrounding empty lines.

-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @jchelary@emacs.ch
https://traductaire-libre.org
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/