Hi,
Following to a post from Francois on the main geany list (http://lists.uvena.de/pipermail/geany/2008-April/003235.html, yeah it's a bit old :-) ) I am considering about changing the French translation for 'plugin'. Until now I simply used the 'plugin' anglicism without any localization, mainly because I was too lazy :-) and I found this simpler and more coherent with the English version.
Right now I'm thinking about changing this term, and the more likely to replace 'plugin' is "greffon". here are some pros and cons for the replacement :
+ "greffon" is already used in many other projects, mainly GNOME and related GTK+ projects + this word already exists in the french language (usually related to biology and medicine -transplants-), with a very similar meaning + the term in itself in simple (one word)
- there may be many (french) users already used to the 'plugin' term, so the change may introduce some incomprehensions - this is obviously a loss of easiness, in the translation itself as there is many strings to change, and for potential french dev, the difference between the translation and the internal naming may be confusing - What about third party plugins ? There may be a lack of unification with the 2 terms mixed together. Also, I'm not sure about this point but there may be some hard coded 'plugin' strings, and the documentation refers to 'plugin' as there is no french translation.
I looked up some others translations and the german one doesn't show any localization for the term (maybe because there is none ?), but the spanish one uses "complemento" so there should not be any major issues with changing the term.
If anyone cares feel free to drop a comment :-) Otherwise I may or may not do the change, depending on the date for the next release and the time I'll spend on it ;-)
Cheers, Jean-Philippe M.
Salut Jean-Phillippe :)
On 10/06/2008, at 7:54 AM, Jean-Philippe wrote:
Hi,
Following a post from Francois on the main geany list (http://lists.uvena.de/pipermail/geany/2008-April/003235.html , yeah it's a bit old :-) ) I am considering about changing the French translation for 'plugin'. Until now I simply used the 'plugin' anglicism without any localization, mainly because I was too lazy :-) and I found this simpler and more coherent with the English version.
Right now I'm thinking about changing this term, and the more likely to replace 'plugin' is "greffon". here are some pros and cons for the replacement :
- "greffon" is already used in many other projects, mainly GNOME and
related GTK+ projects
- this word already exists in the french language (usually related
to biology and medicine -transplants-), with a very similar meaning
- the term in itself in simple (one word)
- there may be many (french) users already used to the 'plugin'
term, so the change may introduce some incomprehensions
- this is obviously a loss of easiness, in the translation itself as
there is many strings to change, and for potential french dev, the difference between the translation and the internal naming may be confusing
- What about third party plugins ? There may be a lack of
unification with the 2 terms mixed together. Also, I'm not sure about this point but there may be some hard coded 'plugin' strings, and the documentation refers to 'plugin' as there is no french translation.
I looked up some others translations and the german one doesn't show any localization for the term (maybe because there is none ?), but the spanish one uses "complemento" so there should not be any major issues with changing the term.
If anyone cares feel free to drop a comment :-) Otherwise I may or may not do the change, depending on the date for the next release and the time I'll spend on it ;-)
In Vietnamese, we use « phần bổ sung », which means "supplemental part". We don't have your problem of changing long-standing vocabulary, because our translation effort is very new. But I have found that avoiding the use of English terms is good for the language in general, since it makes us develop appropriate translated terms, and makes sure we understand them when we use them.
from Clytie
Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:24:29 +0200, Jean-Philippe skateinmars@skateinmars.net wrote:
Hi,
- "greffon" is already used in many other projects, mainly GNOME and
related GTK+ projects
- this word already exists in the french language (usually related to
biology and medicine -transplants-), with a very similar meaning
- the term in itself in simple (one word)
This would be enough pros for me and the cons below are not good enough, IMO. But I don't speak French(at least not more than what I remember from school :D), so don't count my voice.
- this is obviously a loss of easiness, in the translation itself as
there is many strings to change, and for potential french dev, the difference between the translation and the internal naming may be confusing
For other translators, you can add translation comments to the po file. I don't know the exact syntax for it without searching but e.g. poedit can do this for you.
- What about third party plugins ? There may be a lack of unification
with the 2 terms mixed together. Also, I'm not sure about this point
This can't be avoided except using English only as an interface language and even then it can happen that the same action is named differently. Don't care too much about this.
but there may be some hard coded 'plugin' strings, and the
There shouldn't be any user-visible strings which can't be translated. If you find one, tell us.
documentation refers to 'plugin' as there is no french translation.
Happens to all languages, there is IMO no easy way to avoid this except translating the documentation into each supported language but this would probably exceed available resources.
I looked up some others translations and the german one doesn't show any localization for the term (maybe because there is none ?), but
In German, there is no translation which makes any sense. The German term for 'transplants' exists which is 'Transplantate' but it isn't usable for 'plugins', IMO. More suitable would be "Programmerweiterung" which is (when translated back into English) 'application extension'. But it's too long, it's more a description. Another approach could be 'Zusatzmodul' which is 'additional module' but it sounds strange and it's common practice to use 'plugin' also in German (as far as I know).
This is why I like English sometimes more than German: you can express things very short and concisely (not always but more often than in German). Furthermore, sometimes people try to translate things only to have them translated. I noticed this sometimes in the past when discussing or translating components of Xfce. But such issues can be easily solved by talking about it ;-).
Anyway, to make a long story short:
If 'greffon' fits the term, why not translating it. But let's see what the real French speaking people think about.
Regards, Enrico