Why not translating pangram?

[Tommy He]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/12/27 Tommy He <lovenemesis at fedoraproject.org>:
>> My dear fellows,
>>
>> Probably you're familiar with the famous phrase 'The quick brown fox
>> jumps over the lazy dog'. As a pangram[1] it seems to be a standard
>> typeface sample in any font viewer or configuration tool on any OS or
>> DE. I'm fine with its popularity. What always confuses me is that it
>> always remains the English form, never localized. I searched online,
>> but the seemingly all-known Internet failed to provide an reasonable
>> answer. Until recently I pick up the localization of fonts-tweak-tool,
>> which is a new font configuration tool formally introduced in coming
>> Fedora 18[2], this question haunted in my mind so hard that I have to
>> ask here.
>>
>> Since the main purpose of pangram in font viewer is about the
>> typefaces of characters, it wouldn't be much useful if literally
>> translating 'quick brown fox' into another language. The ideal way I
>> can think is to find a pangram native to the target language. For
>> example, if I were using gnome-font-viewer to open a Chinese font(it
>> seems that the metadata of a font can tell what language this font is
>> intended for, but I'm not 100% sure), my concern is on how this font
>> looks on Chinese characters. The 'quick brown fox' only showing 26
>> alphabetical English characters just won't do. A Chinese pangram, if
>> exists, will provide more in this case. However, in practice, there's
>> a need to know how the 26 English alphabets look even in a non-English
>> font. So displaying the English and the localized pangrams side by
>> side would be more suitable.
>>
>> All right. To put it simple, do you think it would be more helpful if:
>> a). for English font, display the "quick brown fox" pangram as sample.
>> b). for non-English font, display the "quick brown fox" AND the
>> pangram native to the language specified by the font metadata as
>> samples.
>>
>> Obviously it requires both effort from developers and translators to
>> make it happen. I'm not sure if there's any technical difficulty in
>> fonts-tweak-tool thus CCed the main developer Akira. Also I'm writing
>> to you the translators of Fedora Project to seek your opinions and
>> expertise.
>>
>> PS: There are quite a number of pangrams in numerous languages listed
>> on Wikipedia[3].
>>
>
> As a matter of fact GTK+/GNOME stack (in the Pango library [1]) has a
> list of pangrams and a function to display it in user's native
> language. I've seen it used e.g. in gnome-font-viewer and sushi. Is
> fonts-tweak-tool based on GTK+? If so, it can easily use
> pango_language_get_sample_string() API.
>
> [1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/pango/tree/pango/pango-language-sample-table.h

fonts-tweak-tool seems to base on PyGTK+. Hope it wouldn't be a issue
to utilize pango_language_get_sample_string() API.
Still, it's a question better to be answered by Akira :)

Thanks,
Tommy

> --
> Piotr Drąg
> http://raven.fedorapeople.org/
> --
> trans mailing list
> trans at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/trans



-- 
Take a Deep Breath out of Windows

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lovenemesis