89015 - evang - Russian translation of evangelism letters

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P3)

Description

[Andrew Simmons]

Russian translations of at least the webmaster and layer evangelism letters. See
#86690 tracking bug for detail. Translator: Deyana Novakovic.

Comment 1

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Andrew, giving to you since you will be doing the work.

Comment 2

[Andrew Simmons]

Progress: Sat down with the translator (Deyana Markovic) to examine the problem
of technical phrases; spent a merry afternoon googling for English-Russian
technical dictionaries, finally found one that's not a deadtree book for sale :)

Query:  Are "brands" such as 'mozilla', 'Netscape' etc to be used "as is"? Is
there an i8ln standard or convention for this?

Comment 3

[timeless]

yes don't translate netscape or mozilla. fwiw there's a dictionary @ 
microsoft.com for commonly used ui strings... (i think for all lnaguages w2k 
localizes to)

Comment 4

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

All Evangelism Bugs are now in the Product Tech Evangelism. See bug 86997 for
details.

Comment 5

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Just a little question, sorry for posting it here: I am a Russian, how can I
contribute to the translation? I have not found any information on mozilla.org

Comment 6

[Jacek Piskozub]

Nikolai: Just read what needs to be transtated at bug 86690 (comment by Bob
Clary, June 22, 10:26). Post the translated files as attachements to this bug
(use the proper codepage - which is KOI8, I believe). Read the history of the
finished Polish translation bug 92342 - it may help you avoid some traps I fell
into on the way.

Comment 7

[Andrew Simmons]

Attachment: Russian (machine) translation of evangelism letters

Comment 8

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Well, my comment to the posted texts: just as I assumed, they are awful. They
_could_ have been understood by the webmasters, but I doubt they would want to
lose their (valuable) time to decipher them - the language is quite cryptic.
Andrew, thanks for posting them, I'm already firing up XEmacs. Wish me luck.
BTW, the original letters are missing (Jacek, links posted by Bob are 404-ed
now), I will certainly be able to figure out what was meant, but I also wish I
could have the originals too.

Second question is: are the variable names in Evangelism start page to be
translated? I concluded they should, from what I've read in bug 92342. But, I
think we should better leave them in English, just because translitterated
Russian looks awful and aches the eyes :))

Comment 9

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

PS. There are still issues to check out: 

1. Translation of Bugzilla itself - it bring advantages to the final product and
if people will use translated interface for Evangelism, they should be able to
use translated (or maybe even simplificated - it's too complicated for virgin
minds :))) Bugzilla interface. 

2. Bugzilla should also be standards-compliant :)) Look at the code it generates....

3. My personal wish - get rid of rc-variables in letter.html. Or re-invent them.
 Or at least write comments on how they would be used. English is a quite simple
language, others have issues like changing endings of words, changing word
order, etc. And there is no worse publicity than improper use of language on a
page - the law is: if you can't do it properly, don't do it at all.
Andrew, just one more question - the file attached should be separated in four
_text_ files, shouldn't it? Then I'll just cut the HTML-tags out...

Comment 10

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Sorry for spam, but could someone _please_ send me the original (English)
letters? The machine-translation is really difficult to decipher ;) Thanks in
advance.

Comment 11

[Andrew Simmons]

Nikolai,

URLs I used for the sources of the machine translation: 

http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/letter/en-layer-evangelism-letter.txt
http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/letter/en-webmaster-evangelism-letter.txt
http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/letter/en-tls-evangelism-letter.txt
http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/letter/en-plugin-developer-evangelism-letter.txt


- 'en-layer' becomes 'ru-layer' etc.

Comment 12

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Sorry, Andrew, they are gone :((( I try my best to finish this thing anyway - it
took longer than I expected. 

Comment 13

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Me again. I have almost done the rough (unedited) tranlation of everything. I
just have an other topic of discussion, which I think is very important: why do
we translate the letters? Because we want the webmasters to understand them. Why
the hell do we give English "Netscape-Developers'" links to them? It's absurd -
I guess, I'd rather be rewriting the whole thing according to russian traditions
and practices AND giving them translated stuff - like translations of A List
Apart's texts, translated W3C Standards' Texts etc. And once again - there is no
point in pointing them to Bugzilla, if they don't understand English, since
Bugzilla has not been yet translated.

So, that's my point of view on this topic: How do you think I should proceed,
translate unchanged or "localised"?

Comment 14

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

Nikolai, I have some comments on your comments.

1. For Japanese at least, it helps to explain the problem in Japanese.
   Technical people are often used to reading technical materials in
   English. But if there are complex issues, it would really help to
   provide exaplanation in the native language.
   This is not perfect but better than conducting everything in English.
2. For the Japanese letter, I am including Japanese references when they
   are available. So, that is every translator should think about. 
3. In the above, translation is a minomer in this case. Good translation
   of evangelism letters would be more like 'localization' which means
   translation + adapting to local conventions + other things to make
   it more usable for the target language people.
4. So in summary, as long as you don't disturb the mail script part of the
   letter tool, you can be creative in localizing the letter files.
   (That is what I am doing for Japanese.)

Comment 15

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

the english and polish versions of the tech-letter-xx.html have been checked in.
What is the status of this translation? Has it been reviewed? Even if it is out
of date should we check it in anyway?

Comment 16

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Well, I'm sorry to say that the russian version has been almost forgotten in
between other work. :( I'll try to find what's left (I hope there is something,
but I had several hard drive crashes in the time, so there is not much hope). I
think a [help-needed] would be appropriate - I do not have anything which could
be checked in now.

Comment 17

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

No problem. I apologize for not being more active myself. Please work from the
latest versions of the tech-letter-en.html in bug 86690.

Comment 18

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

andrew's mail bounces and Nicolai can no longer work on evangelism, -> WONTFIX

If anyone is interested in this, please contact me before beginning any work as
the evangelism effort may be undergoing some changes.