Replies: 5 comments 20 replies
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Just to give one anecdotal datapoint from Germany, we had one professor for operating systems who translated everything. Students disliked it a lot, basically we had to learn everything twice: the English word for day to day use/stack overflow, and the German word for this one class. |
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Yeah, I've seen this happen in Denmark too 😄 From what I understand, there was an effort to translate everything back in the 60-70'ties. So many people will talk about EDB in Danish, short for Elektronisk databehandling, just like you have EDV for Elektronische Datenverarbeitung in German... |
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We've discussed this a bit in the past in PRs comments. My advice has been to agree on a style for your particular language. Document it somewhere: in the related issue, at the top of the PO file, etc... I'm fine with the English words being in italic and/or in parentheses. Different languages and cultures likely have different norms here and I know that I don't have the knowledge to make editorial choices on behalf on all languages :-) The most important part is to keep it consistent and to follow conventions, if any exist. We could perhaps add something about this to the style guide? |
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My feeling is that carefully selecting what to translate and what not is what gives the sense of quality in a translation; and the inertia of translating everything mostly comes from either automated translations or paid translators that lack domain-specific knowledge on what are they translating. I would like to gauge here for most languages what is the most common norm for regular people (not from a language academy) and see if it can be put in the style guide as you suggest. It's probable that the consensus could be something like "don't translate technical terms in any language except for these languages: X,Y,Z". Also I am attempting to avoid duplication of efforts. If everything gets translated forward to the target language and then it is found to be jarring and we need to go back it will need a lot of additional efforts. Instead, we can try to settle here on what could work best overall so later changes could be less impactful. |
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Similar to @jiyongp, we (or mostly I) refer to the Japanese version of rustbook. I also try to keep the term as it is, or transliterate it if: a term is very rust-specific, or might appear in rust code. This is helpful for Japanese readers to refer back to English document when they need to. (In theory, we can completely translate those words, but it's also difficult to reconstruct original rust terms from Japanese version-> English version sometimes.) This requires judgement, of course. |
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For countries that use Traditional Chinese, most technical people are pretty comfortable with reading English, so I would opt for keeping technical terms in English to prevent having to learn those terms twice. This also avoids the situation of different sources translating the same term differently, resulting in confusion. |
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@hueich, did you see my idea about adding a glossary below? I think it could be useful for English speakers as well as non-English speakers. It would show up in searches, so people could quickly find what they need and then go back to the page that covers the material in more detail. |
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Yea, I think having a glossary is helpful. But that can work both ways, i.e. English in the material that readers can find the Chinese translation, or Chinese in the material and find the English original, so in my mind it doesn't sway the decision one way or another. So the minor concern I have is that if an instance of a term was translated in a variation that's different than the official term in the material, readers can't find that in the glossary anymore, unless we include all the variants that we know of, which would take more work. But I also prefer reading technical material in English, since so many existing programming resources are in English, such that I think about programming in English. :) So it would be helpful to get other people's input too. |
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Me too 😄 I run all my computers with an English locale since it gives me the most consistent and reliable experience. So it's hard to judge how others feel about it. I live in Switzerland and I notice that people around me (outside of Google) use their machine in German — and the same in Denmark where I'm originally from. That's of course consumer products so it might not apply. However, I have heard that there are sub-communities of developers who do all their work in their native language. Heck, I've even seen code with Danish variable names and comments once 🙂 It looks odd when you're used to an all English environment. |
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@vzz1x2 @JaviSorribes - as contributors/reviewers for Spanish translations, what is your take here? do you agree/disagree? |
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I agree some keywords like Arc and Send don't make sense to translate to another language. |
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We now have a glossary: https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/glossary.html 🎉 You'll see it become part of the Spanish translation when you refresh the translation next with new strings. |
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It should be in English "Send", it makes no sense in Spanish. As you mention, this is a Rust specific thing and translating it adds more confusion than it helps. |
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I'm now reviewing #1333, I think that for the menus we can go with the English terms alone, as translating on the menus can add too much noise. I am leaning towards approving the PR, I don't see a problem with it. One could argue that some folks might not know what "Send" means, but the thing is, once you click, it is explained what it means for Rust. That should be enough. If there's any case where this does not work, i.e. the original text expects the reader to understand the english meaning of the keyword, please highlight it and we can discuss each item independently. |
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Yes. I agree that for the menus it works better to have the terms in English. |
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Just an update to people here: We now have a glossary. This is meant to be a place where you can establish the relationship between the English words and your locale. Please help by
Let me know what you think! |
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Just a bit of an open discussion to see what others think here.
I am noticing that by default we are attempting to translate almost everything into the target language. My experience is mainly with Spanish vs English so I'm not sure if my perspective applies to other languages too, but a friend also noticed the same on the German translation and we seem to share the same opinion.
In IT related stuff we tend to borrow words from English for technical stuff: borrowing, pattern matching, compile time, etc. These words while they were used because the original meaning kind of matched what we needed to convey, over time they start to convey specifically something different in the context. Even in English I bet it would sound weird if we start to use synonyms to replace these.
As a result, for Spanish speakers, we also borrow the same English words verbatim just for that special meaning. This is also extra useful for us as it points out very clearly that this is a technical specific term and not part of normal conversation. We tend to give it a special meaning. (For example, I thought time ago that "chat" was specific to text chat application, and I was puzzled when someone called me on the phone (voice) just after asking me to chat)
The usual way we deal with these English terms in Spanish is to have them in italics (or quotes if italics doesn't work) then add the meaning in Spanish in parenthesis afterwards.
Once the reader gets used to the new English term we just put them in italics and drop the Spanish counterpart.
On the other hand translating every term tends to feel... cringe? (in Spanish at least) But also very confusing: "Borrow checker" -> "Comprobador de préstamos". "Ownership" -> "Propiedad" / "Dueño". It does read as very unnatural and forced, but also the lack of the original English words threatens the ability to google it. See: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=rust+comprobador+de+pr%C3%A9stamos (5 results, some of the titles look like bad translations)
It is also true that in Spain, the RAE (Spanish Language Academy) has a push for "translating everything", although most people dislike this approach in practice. But they also recommend the approach I outlined above for foreign words.
I'm not sure how other languages deal with this. What does everyone think? Is this something we would like to have a common way to deal with across languages, or should it be per-language? What is your opinion?
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