Re: Translation of manuals (was: SES manual French translation)

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 5, 2024, at 9:04, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> writes:
> 
>> More pragmatically, it is because I am a freelance worker who is paid
>> by the hour. I can’t allow myself to give more to the client than what
>> I am paid for. I need to assume that the source document is of
>> reasonable quality and that its intent is clear.
>> 
>> When I translate or otherwise contribute to free software projects, the
>> ethics are slightly different, but that does not profoundly change the
>> way I work.
> 
> When you do volunteer translations and deeply care about the source
> material, the process is indeed different.  I myself often end up with
> long lists of proposed edits to the original.

I do submit a list of mistakes and their fixes when I translate for 
money, because we’re also proofreaders in a way.

> Improving ses.texi was one motivation for Vincent when he translated it
> to French, IIUC.  I'm sure some translators will want to do that, and
> others won't.
> 
> The flip-side is that doing it can get very time consuming.

Haha! Yes. That’s why I fully rewrote the OmegaT manual last year to 
prepare the 6.0 release. :)

>> Decorations are irrelevant in OmegaT. Only the msgid contents is taken
>> into account. Decorations are also not shown in the OmegaT editor. I
>> just see the paragraphs, above, below, and I translate the text
>> contents without worrying about the decorations.
> 
> BTW, OmegaT is well worth trying out for anyone interested in
> translating.

It’s the only free software translation editor for professional (and 
committed amateur) translators. Since its first release in 2002, we 
managed to keep it free of “cloud versions for money” and other kinds of 
strings. As the current project coordinator, I insist on saying that it 
is “free software” and not “open source software”, and I introduced the 
4 freedoms in the short help text that’s displayed when you launch 6.0.

We have infrastructure on non-free systems (github for one), but that’s 
parts I don’t have skills to propose fixes for and we’re all volunteers. 
But I’m currently exploring ways to remove such dependencies. Etc.

> My hope is that we eventually will have something similar for Emacs, of
> course, but we are very far off still.  I'm not aware of any project
> that has attempted to build that.

There were discussions on the emacs user list a while back that was 
started by Macin Borkowski, where I attempted to explain what was the 
typical process in “professional” tools (or rather, using the industry 
standards that are TMX/SRX, etc.) 

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2020-05/msg00168.html

The thread extended into December of that year and it was really 
interesting.

OmegaT is the reason why I got interested in emacs. That was slightly 
before the Common Lisp revival of the early 2000s. Before Seibel wrote 
his Common Lisp book. The editor “field” in OmegaT does not come with 
all the editing features that Emacs has (obviously) and I thought that 
maybe it would be worth trying to have it the other way round, i.e. 
build something like OmegaT on emacs. At the time I was making a lot of 
(free) seminars in Japan to introduce OmegaT in the hope of finding 
developers. One managed to use a python to java “bridge” to interact 
with OmegaT from Emacs, but that was it.

I’m not holding my breath for such a “mode” to be developed. But it’s 
OK. I would not think of writing SVG images in Emacs, so I’m fine doing 
my translation work in OmegaT. I use Emacs for other things.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @jchelary@emacs.ch
https://traductaire-libre.org
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/