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

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 3, 2024, at 22:53, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> If context is important when translating technical documentation (and
> it is IME), then any change in a paragraph will in many cases affect
> more than the sentence corresponding to the one modified in English.
> 
> Moreover, a good translation of a paragraph will in many cases produce
> a translated paragraph without 1:1 correspondence between sentences.
> So changes in the original will need to consider much more than a
> single sentence anyway.

I’m not sure this is the place to discuss translation theory and as a 
practitioner who pays my bills mostly with translation I can say with 
confidence that over the millions of words I’ve translated in more than 
20 years (including published translations), there are only few cases 
where I needed to fundamentally alter the structure of a paragraph.

Working both from Japanese and English to French on contracts varying 
for poetry to electronic circuitry, I think my experience is wide 
enough that I can assert this: in a time of dehumanization of whatever 
technology touches, it’s OK for translators to say that a good 
translation often requires changing a lot of things. In practice, 
though, paragraph structure is rarely where change happens. Simply 
because it is easier to make a good translation by respecting paragraph 
structure. Now experience may vary, and different language pairs may 
require different arrangements.

>> I’m not sure I understand what kind of marks you envision. Paragraphs
>> are already marked by surrounding empty lines.
> 
> I mean, for example, give each paragraph a number, like so:

Ok, so the markers are IDs.

> @node Display Margins
>  @subsection Displaying in the Margins
>  @cindex display margins
>  @cindex margins, display

As long as the above strings are to be translated, they need an ID too.

>  @c para 1234
> 
>  @c para 1235
> 
>  @c para 1236

Is the numbering automatic?

What if you add paragraphs in the middle, like Vincent did? Will the 
author have to check the IDs and add a number that’s not used already?

There are plenty of issues with static IDing parts of a document.

Here is the way po4a "transforms" the paragraphs that you used as an example:

#. type: Plain text
#: /Users/suzume/Documents/Repositories/Projet OmegaT de Documentation Emacs -
#: Sources/doc/lispref/display.texi:5613
msgid ""
"A buffer can have blank areas called @dfn{display margins} on the left and "
"on the right.  Ordinary text never appears in these areas, but you can put "
"things into the display margins using the @code{display} property.  There is "
"currently no way to make text or images in the margin mouse-sensitive."
msgstr ""

#. type: Plain text
#: /Users/suzume/Documents/Repositories/Projet OmegaT de Documentation Emacs -
#: Sources/doc/lispref/display.texi:5619
msgid ""
"The way to display something in the margins is to specify it in a margin "
"display specification in the @code{display} property of some text.  This is "
"a replacing display specification, meaning that the text you put it on does "
"not get displayed; the margin display appears, but that text does not."
msgstr ""

#. type: Plain text
#: /Users/suzume/Documents/Repositories/Projet OmegaT de Documentation Emacs -
#: Sources/doc/lispref/display.texi:5625
msgid ""
"A margin display specification looks like @code{((margin right-margin) "
"@var{spec})} or @code{((margin left-margin) @var{spec})}.  Here, @var{spec} "
"is another display specification that says what to display in the margin.  "
"Typically it is a string of text to display, or an image descriptor."
msgstr ""

The ID is the paragraph. Which makes sense, because translators can 
know that a paragraph has not been translated because its ID is not 
associated with contents.

> When paragraph #1234 in the English original was modified, translators
> will know that they need to update the translation of the
> corresponding paragraph(s) (could be more than one) in their
> translations, and nothing else.  It should be easy to analyze the
> diffs, look for the "@c para NNNN" marks, and present the translator
> with the corresponding paragraph(s) from the translation.

I think po-mode already does that and all the "out of emacs" tools do 
too.

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