[Fedora-trans-ar] Towards a better consistent translation...

Munzir Taha munzirtaha at newhorizons.com.sa
Wed Jul 14 21:25:37 UTC 2004


My previous experience in translations is very 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 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.

First, we agree together that our 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, 
alhadi, has mentioned that official and certified translation deal with them 
like this. He mentioned a lot of stuff regarding United Nations translation 
standard (IIRC).

see the botton of this page, please:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/doc/translation-new-words

Transliteration will get the translators in problems regarding how is it 
pronounced and space 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 ;)

-- 
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




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