Talking about translation (Re: Conflicting changes in Russian translation)

[Matt Mackall]

On Fri, 2011-12-09 at 23:15 +0300, Alexander Sauta wrote:
> (This message is part of discussion on translating Mercurial into Russian.
> The rest of the text is in Russian.)

[a bunch of Russian deleted]

Ok, I have to object to this. First, you're discussing process issues,
which I want to be able to participate in. Second, you are discussing
some fairly generic issues of translation that are in no way specific to
Russian. Says Google Translate:

        "In general, my opinion is this: avoid literal translation of
        the console
        versions of all the terms that are not translated in one word
        adequately,
        instead, conveying meaning of the sentence (pull changes -
        download
        changes). Turtle can not afford this luxury because
        that there's often necessary to transfer the signature to any
        button, but it
        should be monosyllabic, and unfortunately have to write the same
        "pull".
        By the way, possibly including and so we have a disagreement;)
        "
        
I disagree. I really think you should use "<pull>" (тянуть?) in the
sense of "pull on an object", because push/pull is a core metaphor that
Mercurial uses. If "<download>" was the right answer, then we would have
used "download" as the English version. In other words, we've got three
layers:

[command names] -> [metaphor] -> [underlying concept]

..where in the case of English, <command name> ~= <metaphor>. 

 'pull' -> 'pull changes' -> 'download the data for new changesets'

So 'pull' serves as a literal command name and core jargon. But
translating this to:

 'pull' -> '<download changes>' -> '<download the data for new
changesets>'

means the metaphor is lost. Now I get that this may not work for
pre-existing terms for pre-Mercurial concepts like 'patch' - there may
be an existing well-established Russian word for software patches that
doesn't correspond to the 'put a patch on a tire' metaphor, in which
case you should use that jargon to avoid confusion.

I may be wrong, there may be good reasons and precedent for abandoning
our central metaphors when translating. But whatever the right answer is
to this issue, I doubt it's specific to Russian. All translators should
be on the same page here, which means we need to discuss (and document)
it in the project's default language.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.