Re: German translations for psppire

[John Darrington]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 11:48:53PM +0200, Andreas Streichardt wrote:

     Unfortunately the german translations are making it unusable for me :( (as 
     stated in the Disclaimer of the po ;) ). I stumpled upon an error and 
     couldn't understand what it was trying to tell me :(.

I can quite understand that.  My primary motive for adding a this
localisation was so that during development I could tell whether
psppire was correctly responding to the locale settings, and German
happens to be the only other language which I have any inkling of.
Future versions will allow separate languages for the user interface
and the output, so that Germans can prepare statistical reports for
publication in Spanish journals etc.
     
     This was actually the first time i ever edited a po file and i did it 
without 
     any tools (vim ;) ).


I use emacs po mode.  But there is also poedit in the GNOME suite,
which is quite good.  On the other hand vim should be fine too if you
don't forget to close quotes etc.
     
     Hopefully the translator(s?) don't take my comments personally. German is 
a 
     difficult language compared to english

I really need to go back to school and brush up my German.  On the one
hand German is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to
learn, since English is a descendent.  German has to be the most
regular of all languages (except Esperanto).  On the other hand,
having 3 genders, 3 vocatives at least 4 noun cases and the fact that
verbs always come at the end of sentences (and in the case of compound
sentences, sub-clauses get inserted in the middle) makes it hard to string a
non-trivial sentence together.  See Mark Twain's view on the this
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

      and translating a very special 
     software with many Fachausdr?cken (see - dunno evn know the
     english word ;) ) 

"specialist terminology" ?

     is probably the hardest job to do and my french would beat your german 
VERY 
     easily ;) Furthermore many of the Fachausdr?cke shouldn't even be 
translated 
     as they made their way into the german (researchers) language.

     
     As i said, my suggestion is to simply remove it as it is not really needed 
but 
     makes it unusable for a german user currently :S.

I agree.  A poor translation is worse than no translation.

I suggest what we do is to incorporate Andreas' patch, and also to
remove de from po/LINGUAS until such time as a native German speaker
wants to come forward and maintain a localisation.
     

J'

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