[translations] Limitations of the source-string-centric approach

[Cog Rusty]

On 7/20/07, Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard at killesreiter.de> wrote:
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> Hans Salvisberg schrieb:
> > Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
> >>> That's also an issue I have discovered, for example with the string
> >>> "Your @type has been created." (with @type being the name of a
> >>> content type).
> >>>
> >>> I'll explain the problem for people who don't understand the problem:
> >>> Content type names have a specific gender in most languages; let's
> >>> take "story", which translates to "Artikel" in German. The word
> >>> "Artikel" is male, thus the sentence should be "Ihr Artikel wurde
> >>> erstellt." (Ihr = Your). However, if we use page = Seite, we end up
> >>> with "Ihr Seite wurde erstellt." The problem here is that "Seite" is
> >>> female, thus requiring "Ihre" in the German language. This results in
> >>> grammatically incorrect sentences. A wrong gender is not a minor
> >>> issue for a native speaker, it really disturbs the reading flow and
> >>> may shed a bad light on the site creator.
> >>>
> >> The hungarian team works around this by actually translating '@type has
> >> been created'.
> >>
> > I replaced this on my German-language sites with "Ihr Beitrag vom Typ
> > %type wurde gespeichert." ("Your post of type %type has been created.")
> > It's slightly technical,
>
> It's ugly.
>
> > but at least it's grammatically correct.
>
> Correct but ugly.
>
> > Grammatical errors are not acceptable, but it's often possible to come
> > up with more generic phrases.
>
> While that is true it makes a website often not very nice to read. We
> should try to find technical solutions that allow translators to make
> good translations and not force them to make ugly translations.


As long as I have not found a solution, I prefer the extremes. One
might as well go all the way and make it "Your post has been created"
at the cost of some loss of information. How does the saying go...
"The more beautiful, the less faithful".

Or else insert some punctuation and make it "@type: created" to
indicate clearly that it was not intended to be a full sentence. Both
these approaches seem more likely not to trigger a dismissive response
by a visitor of the site.


> Cheers,
>         Gerhard
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