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

[Stefan Kangas]

Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
writes:

> More pragmatically, it is because I am a freelance worker who is paid
> by the hour. I can’t allow myself to give more to the client than what
> I am paid for. I need to assume that the source document is of
> reasonable quality and that its intent is clear.
>
> When I translate or otherwise contribute to free software projects, the
> ethics are slightly different, but that does not profoundly change the
> way I work.

When you do volunteer translations and deeply care about the source
material, the process is indeed different.  I myself often end up with
long lists of proposed edits to the original.

Improving ses.texi was one motivation for Vincent when he translated it
to French, IIUC.  I'm sure some translators will want to do that, and
others won't.

The flip-side is that doing it can get very time consuming.

> Decorations are irrelevant in OmegaT. Only the msgid contents is taken
> into account. Decorations are also not shown in the OmegaT editor. I
> just see the paragraphs, above, below, and I translate the text
> contents without worrying about the decorations.

BTW, OmegaT is well worth trying out for anyone interested in
translating.

My hope is that we eventually will have something similar for Emacs, of
course, but we are very far off still.  I'm not aware of any project
that has attempted to build that.