Re: Changing the language of gnus menu entries

[Joost Kremers]

Drew Adams wrote:
>> Well, *I* would not have been able to understand enough to learn Emacs
>> basics from it.
>
> Even if your only alternative were in a language you could not read at all?
> Thai?

Not having an alternative does not make me understand the translation
better. ;-) It might make me try a little harder to make sense of it,
though.

>> Perhaps. But I was thinking of people who understand enough English to
>> get through e.g., the tutorial with some effort, who'd prefer a
>> translation in their own language and are then put off by the Google
>> Translate translation. It creates a bad first impression, which might
>> rub off on Emacs as a whole.
>
> That's not the use case I'm talking about.  Such a person would not try
> an on-the-fly Google translation.  Circulez, il n'y a rien a voir.

Ok, then perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind. I thought
you wanted to automatically provide a Google translation of Emacs help
texts if no human-made translation exists. That way, someone wanting to
try out Emacs and installing it on a machine with say a German locale
would get a Google-translated tutorial if they pressed `C-h t'. If that
were to happen to me, with a translation as problematic as the example
you posted, I'd probably uninstall Emacs again, thinking that if a piece
of software isn't able to provide a decent translation of the tutorial,
the rest of the software probably isn't much good either.

As an extra option, one that is not provided automatically but only at
the user's request, and clearly indicated as being a machine
translation, that's a different thing.

> [And even some people who don't need this feature, such as yourself,
> might experiment with it anyway and send in corrections (just as you did,
> *immediately*, signaling that the "key" translation for German was off).]

Actually, that wasn't me. :-) (I had noticed it, but I haven't comment on it.)

>> > Even someone such as yourself, whose English is excellent, should not be
>> > "scared off" by the translated text shown above.  You might laugh a bit,
>> > and you might scratch your head a bit here and there.
>> 
>> The English translation you provided was a lot better, I'll admit.
>
> Consider too the possibility that you might find it better because you
> are better at German than English?

I'm not sure how that would allow me to understand the English
translation better than the German one...

Besides, I think they're just about the same. (Though others would have
to be the judge of that.)


-- 
Joost Kremers                                   joostkremers@fastmail.fm
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)