GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 660086
The Swedish translation is not taking into account the context in question (everyone can comment)
Last modified: 2011-10-03 11:21:34 UTC
I'm about to bash the Swedish translation, so bare with me. I'm doing this for a better user experience. The Swedish translation is bad. It's just bad. I get the feeling it has all been translated literally, without taking into account the actual context. e. g. "Document Viewer" is both "the" and "a" "Document Viewer", but in Swedish it's either (a) "Dokumentvisare" or (the) "Dokumentvisaren". Currently all of the applications are being translated to the "a"-form (obestämd form). That's not right. I mean evince is (the) Document Viewer of GNOME, not just another viewer. The current translation is also very literal and fix. The translator hasn't taken any freedom to really Translate. Translation is not just about finding and replacing - it's about expressing a message in another language. I'm currently using the original English version but I'm going to log out and back using Swedish and report back with more translation errors. What I want to do is get the freedom to remake the whole translation to Swedish for GNOME 3.4 (3.2 is string frozen, right?). Swedish is my native language and I know fluid English so it should be a piece of cake. I'm reporting this to get some comments from you guys about my idea. Do you think Document Viewer is "the" or "a"? (It's the same for all applications; (the) Movie Player, (the) System Monitor, etc..)
Okay so It's not all that bad actually, but I still think the application names are kind of wrong. I could do some fixing for 3.4. What do you think about the "a/the" issue?
(In reply to comment #1) > What do you think about the "a/the" issue? No idea, but gnome-shell doesn't have anything to do with it - the (translated) name is provided by each application's .desktop file.
I know but when I reported a problem with the name of gedit I was sent to the Shell team. I kind of get bounced around a lot :P
Being bounced around is a normal part of a bug report's lifecycle! :-) As for the subject. Personally, I would disagree with the use of definite form. In my view, evince is just A document viewer, not THE one and only. Not even when I run Gnome. If one is VERY Gnome centric, one could possibly argue for it being the one and only. But many users are not quite that orthodox. Also, if you take a look in the desktop file, you will see that most languages, at least the ones I understand or can guess, use the indefinite form. I couldn't find ANY case where the definite form was used, though there are of course many languages in there I don't understand at all. Finally, I would encourage you to bring this kind of stylistic arguments up on the tp-sv mailing list (http://www.tp-sv.se/dok-2.html). It was originally created for the "Translation Project", but it is also used by other project's translation teams. In particular, discussions of Gnome translations happen there. Welcome as a member!
Denna bug är egentligen nonsens för jag utgick från en testversion av GNOME 3.2 där översättningen var helt fel och otillräcklig. Trodde att det var samma i 3.0 men den ser faktiskt ganska bra ut. Hela tråden kan egentligen ignoreras för det där med obestämd och bestämd form är en bagatell egentligen.
This is really something to discuss among Swedish GNOME translators first. See http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/sv/ for contact information.