Marco Ciampa a ?crit :

I'm not a english native writer, you know... ;-) In the past I've done only a fiew little corrections when the meaning was obvious and asking in this list when the change was not a simple fix.
Now I'm working on blur filters and I've just noted that the german version of the manual is (for all I've seen in this section) much better, with more content either in written material than in example images. I've started to, only for the blur filters, translating the section in italian, and doing this I've updated and enlarged the english version too, because it was very scarce at all. I've done it copying (for all that I uderstood of) the german conten, the schema and the images. Before committing the changes I thought that it should be better to ask the list not only for the cvs commit action but for the meaning of all this doing: is it the english version of the manual the most complete and the reference? Obviously not at all! Why not? Is it a 'good thing' (TM)? From this situation pops up a problem that I can describe well for my language but I think that it's easy to apply to other languages too since it is of much general concern.

No problem, I have also translated german to french and english yet when german is better. I'll do the same if italian is better. English is reference because most people in the world can understand it. It is not the quality reference (it should be of course, but it is not). It's a difficult challenge: developpers know Gimp technics well, but don't like writing help (help in plugin browser is poor or absent...). Artists and graphists know well how to use Gimp but don't like to write help too (they prefer writing books). Gimp help has been written by non-developpers and non-artists and mostly non-english natives. So, don't be afraid writing english. Technical english is not difficult and our "globish" can be understood by everybody. I agree with with you: when somebody writes help for his own language, it is good that he writes also for english. I do so.

I know much better italian than english but my knowledge will suffice (I hope!) to make a good translation in my native tongue. This is not true for the german language which I do not know at all (I admit that I'm not proud of it!) and so I think for almost all the people in this list with little, but significant, exeptions. Now the problem is: why the people that filed the german translation of the manual do not contributed for the english version? I think that my contributes could only be worse than those of people that wrote those pages, beause of my scarce knowledge of english, german and gimp. I think that those people that are enough acquainted with gimp to be able to write original content in native language could improve the usefulness of those contributes with little effort if they try to write an english version too, leaving to the other people more skilled in wrinting in english the correction task.
A grammatical incorrect text is better than no text at all and in this manner, all the other languages people could make a much more complete, and correct work, in his/her native language.

I agree with all that.

PS: I'm glad if someone would like to see my patch before committing it. I do not commit anything if there won't be a 'rough consensus' about my 'method', if someone have some reasons to stop me, please write!

IMHO, you don't need to ask permission before committing, but, if you want, I would be pleased to see your patch.

Julien

Hi Marco, Hi list,

Am 20.11.2005 um 02:05 schrieb Marco Ciampa: [snipped lots of wisdom]

Now the problem is: why the people that filed the german translation of the manual do not contributed for the english version? I
think that my contributes could only be worse than those of people that
wrote those pages, beause of my scarce knowledge of english, german and gimp. I think that those people that are enough acquainted with gimp to be able to write original content in native language could improve
the usefulness of those contributes with little effort if they try to write
an english version too, leaving to the other people more skilled in wrinting in
english the correction task.
A grammatical incorrect text is better than no text at all and in this manner,
all the other languages people could make a much more complete, and correct work, in his/her native language.

well, that author of the german content has been me. Recently I reviewed the filter documentation and added some of the missing filter docs. I'm simply not good enough in writing english to write a new documentation natively in english. Doing it in german was hard enough.
I don't think this problem can be solved easily. I admit that en is somewhat a universal language that every doc writer understands to a certain degree. But nevertheless at least I'm able to read but not able to write en documentation very well. To make changes more transparent each file has history entries as comment at the beginning of it. There everybody can see what happened to the content recently and who did the changes.

These are just my 2 cents...

PS: I'm glad if someone would like to see my patch before committing it. I do not
commit anything if there won't be a 'rough consensus' about my 'method',
if someone have some reasons to stop me, please write!

guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to announce "weak" translations to some proofreaders - do we have such for en??

greetings, lexA

On Sunday 20 November 2005 10:32 am, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Hi Marco, Hi list,

Am 20.11.2005 um 02:05 schrieb Marco Ciampa: [snipped lots of wisdom]

Now the problem is: why the people that filed the german translation of the manual do not contributed for the english version? I
think that my contributes could only be worse than those of people that
wrote those pages, beause of my scarce knowledge of english, german and gimp. I think that those people that are enough acquainted with gimp to be able to write original content in native language could improve
the usefulness of those contributes with little effort if they try to write
an english version too, leaving to the other people more skilled in wrinting in
english the correction task.
A grammatical incorrect text is better than no text at all and in this manner,
all the other languages people could make a much more complete, and correct work, in his/her native language.

well, that author of the german content has been me. Recently I reviewed the filter documentation and added some of the missing filter docs. I'm simply not good enough in writing english to write a new documentation natively in english. Doing it in german was hard enough.
I don't think this problem can be solved easily. I admit that en is somewhat a universal language that every doc writer understands to a certain degree. But nevertheless at least I'm able to read but not able to write en documentation very well. To make changes more transparent each file has history entries as comment at the beginning of it. There everybody can see what happened to the content recently and who did the changes.

These are just my 2 cents...

PS: I'm glad if someone would like to see my patch before committing it. I do not
commit anything if there won't be a 'rough consensus' about my 'method',
if someone have some reasons to stop me, please write!

guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to announce "weak" translations to some proofreaders - do we have such for en??

Does docbook have any mark-ups meaning "do not render this"? (like the Display:None ) CSS property? Or can we have a work-around for that in our stylesheets, using something like 'class ' attributes in the mark-up?

I guess that way, contributors of original material in other languages could always add the English equivalent, doesn't matter how poorly written - that would be marked as "do not render this", and then, people able to do so could just fix the English and mark it as renderable. In the mean time, the poor English material would work as source for other languages as well.

Regards,

JS ->

greetings, lexA

--

Marco Ciampa

+--------------------+

| Linux User #78271 | | FSFE fellow #364 |

+--------------------+

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 01:32:41PM +0100, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Am 20.11.2005 um 02:05 schrieb Marco Ciampa: [snipped lots of wisdom]

Now the problem is: why the people that filed the german translation of the manual do not contributed for the english version? I think that my contributes could only be worse than those of people that wrote those pages, beause of my scarce knowledge of english, german and gimp. I think that those people that are enough acquainted with gimp to be able to write original content in native language could improve the usefulness of those contributes with little effort if they try to write an english version too, leaving to the other people more skilled in wrinting in english the correction task.
A grammatical incorrect text is better than no text at all and in this manner, all the other languages people could make a much more complete, and correct work, in his/her native language.

well, that author of the german content has been me. Recently I reviewed the filter documentation and added some of the missing filter docs. I'm simply not good enough in writing english to write a new documentation natively in english. Doing it in german was hard enough. I don't think this problem can be solved easily. I admit that en is somewhat a universal language that every doc writer understands to a certain degree. But nevertheless at least I'm able to read but not able to write en documentation very well. To make changes more transparent each file has history entries as comment at the beginning of it. There everybody can see what happened to the content recently and who did the changes.

Actually, I join Marcos opinion here. Writing grammatical incorrect text is better than nothing. Providing a translation to english for newly written content is the only way other translators can grasp the idea about the new content. If everyone just translates the text, we could have a far easier setup (like using po and message ids). But the setup allows, that everyone can write more than a 1:1 translation.

It is intended, that other docwriters can extend existing content as well as writing new one. Please give others a chance to take usage of new content.

I really wonder Axel, why you think you're not able to provide a meaningful translation of the german version. You write a well understandable English here and I'm fairly sure this will also work for the help. Julien Hardelin always provides an English translation of newly added French content.

guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to announce "weak" translations to some proofreaders - do we have such for en??

Nice idea, but I doubt that this will work. If some of the native speakers can proof read the (english) content, it'll work better than adding more management tasks for the docwriters.

Greetings,

Am 20.11.2005 um 18:18 schrieb Roman Joost:

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 01:32:41PM +0100, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Am 20.11.2005 um 02:05 schrieb Marco Ciampa: [snipped lots of wisdom]

Actually, I join Marcos opinion here. Writing grammatical incorrect text
is better than nothing.

And that is exactly the point where I can't agree. To sell some crude tech talk (and thats what I could write in en) as a manual should not be what we want to do. As I see it a manual should use a consistent flow of text with a consistent use of terms. And that is what can not reached if a dozen of non natives just do a raw translation of what they write for their "own" language, no matter how willing and engaged they are.

Providing a translation to english for newly written content is the only way other translators can grasp the idea about the new content. If everyone just translates the text, we could have a far easier setup (like using po and message ids). But the setup allows, that everyone can write more than a 1:1 translation.

[x] but if thats the case then that legitimates to extend e.g. de content without translating it to en instantly. Btw. for everything that is related to screenshots it is simply impossible to update since I've the native terms (de in my case) only and can't say how a specific field is called in other languages.

It is intended, that other docwriters can extend existing content as well as writing new one. Please give others a chance to take usage of new content.

I do! Almost 50% of the time I spend with the files is about restructuring content, and as long as anyhow possible every lang will benefit from that changes. For the menu descriptions I did all the reorganization in en;fr;de ! That was possible because almost any necessary content was already there. And last not least can everybody benefit from the (new) german content. Providing a crude en translation would lead to something like

written and thought about in de - raw translation to en
read by someone nativ speaking [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice)
- raw translation to [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice)

I think there are no words necessary to describe the quality of the result, and sorry for saying so, I've seen some mess in the en that was obviously transferred one to one to another language. All in all I think to use en as kind of intermediate language is a bad idea, specially when sold as en manual.

I really wonder Axel, why you think you're not able to provide a meaningful translation of the german version. You write a well understandable English here and I'm fairly sure this will also work for
the help. Julien Hardelin always provides an English translation of newly added French content.

see above

guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to announce "weak" translations to
some proofreaders - do we have such for en??

Nice idea, but I doubt that this will work. If some of the native speakers can proof read the (english) content, it'll work better than adding more management tasks for the docwriters.

I'll think about that for a night - may be I get an idea of how everybody can participate from new content without messing up the en manual.

Greetings, lexA

Greetings,

Am 20.11.2005 um 19:14 schrieb Marco Ciampa:

So you think that is best nothing than a bad (in your personal opinion)
written manual?
Well, so all the people that I meet everyday repeating me 'alla nausea'
that gimp is a really neat program if only it was documented in italian,
at least with a _bad translated manual_ but in italian; all those people
simply are wrong? What is a translated manual inteded for? And for who?

I can understand this people. GIMP is IMHO an _very_ powerful but also pretty complex application with an even powerful but complex user interface. Everything said today leaves no doubt that we (well, to be exact - all the people trying to be creative with GIMP out there) are in need of the best documentation they can get. But lets face the facts - there are dozens of books in a couple of languages on the market already. So it's not that our manual is the only chance to get the information in need. All I want to point out is that I don't think its an good idea to sacrifice the english documentation as a clipboard for the manual editors. In my opinion there is only one chance to bring the power of GIMP to the people: lets beat the complexity of the user interface by a *clean and smart* lineup of the large methods behind the GIMP ui. I'm for example pretty sure that most of that endless SDI vs. MDI discussions as well as that old prejudice concerning GIMPs screen cluttering with dozens of windows (which was true in the ancient GIMP pre 2 ages) would not be written if people would better understand the concepts of dialogs and how they can put together in windows.

But base for that is that we can put all the pieces of knowledge we have together in a clean and consistent way. And yes I stand for this - in my opinion this can be done best by native speakers.

By filling 3rd class content to the en manual we won't help users and - and thats at least as important as the first one - the en writers don't see the gaps in their manual anymore because somebody put _something_ in it.

I hope I could make my point clear a bit ...

Greetings lexA

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 06:48:02PM +0100, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Am 20.11.2005 um 18:18 schrieb Roman Joost:

Actually, I join Marcos opinion here. Writing grammatical incorrect text is better than nothing.

And that is exactly the point where I can't agree. To sell some crude tech talk (and thats what I could write in en) as a manual should not be what we want to do. As I see it a manual should use a consistent flow of text with a consistent use of terms. And that is what can not reached if a dozen of non natives just do a raw translation of what they write for their "own" language, no matter how willing and engaged they are.

Okey, I understand your point and you're right. But you're referring to an ideal situation here, which we don't have currently (and maybe won't have in the future - I'm optimistic). That is, having a native speaker for every language which cares and manages his content and translation. Due to the fact, that most people can't write and manage their content in full time, we won't be able to write documentation in high-quality in the short term. But what we can achieve is high-quality documentation in the long term (given by the fact, that people are proof reading).

Providing a translation to english for newly written content is the only way other
translators can grasp the idea about the new content. If everyone just translates the text, we could have a far easier setup (like using po and message ids). But the setup allows, that everyone can write more than a 1:1 translation.

[x] but if thats the case then that legitimates to extend e.g. de content without translating it to en instantly.

Hm. I don't get what you mean here.

Btw. for everything that is related to screenshots it is simply impossible to update since I've the native terms (de in my case) only and can't say how a specific field is called in other languages.

That is true and understandable. But the only point is to provide an english translation for newly written content here.

It is intended, that other docwriters can extend existing content as well as writing new one. Please give others a chance to take usage of new content.

I do! Almost 50% of the time I spend with the files is about restructuring content, and as long as anyhow possible every lang will benefit from that changes.

Of course they do. Having a consistent structure is a good basis :)

For the menu descriptions I did all the reorganization in en;fr;de ! That was possible because almost any necessary content was already there. And last not least can everybody benefit from the (new) german content.

I don't get how translators who don't speak german understand, what the content is about. How do they know what you or other german writers added there?

Providing a crude en translation would lead to something like

written and thought about in de - raw translation to en
read by someone nativ speaking [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice) - raw translation to [cs;fr;it;nl;sv;zh_CN] (pick one of you choice)

Yes, that could happen.

I think there are no words necessary to describe the quality of the result, and sorry for saying so, I've seen some mess in the en that was obviously transferred one to one to another language. All in all I think to use en as kind of intermediate language is a bad idea, specially when sold as en manual.

I understand your point. The idea behind is to fix the mess you're facing ... Nobody in our project is a professional for writing documentation. That includes that everyone can write a messy and bad understandable description and it happens from time to time. But I thought, working together on one manual should make it less error-prone and helpful. That's the spirit of free software or am I wrong?

guess any content is appreciated. May be we should consider to announce "weak" translations to some proofreaders - do we have such for en??

Nice idea, but I doubt that this will work. If some of the native speakers can proof read the (english) content, it'll work better than adding more management tasks for the docwriters.

I'll think about that for a night - may be I get an idea of how everybody can participate from new content without messing up the en manual.

If I get it correct, than your idea was to mark some content as "translated by non-native speaker" or something. I think, this will only raise the management factor for the writers. It is always a subjective decision when an article is considered as 'done'. Maybe we should discuss a 'verifying-quality-process' in general in a new thread?

Greetings,

I would just like to say that my attitude is that anything that makes the manual better is a good thing, and that people should not be prevented from making it better by the thought that doing even more might make it better still.

There is a well-known saying that in cases like this is good to remember: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Best wishes,

-- Bill

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