[Scummvm-devel] Translations of the About text in ScummVM

[Max Horn]

Am 19.04.2011 um 09:30 schrieb Johannes Schickel:

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Thierry Crozat <criezy at scummvm.org> wrote:
>> 3) The GPL notice:
>> It is not translated currently. I don't know what is the legal implication of this notice and if we can replace the english notice with a translated one. On the gnu.org website the translated FAQ page has this notice in english which each sentenced followed by "Traduction:" (which means "translation" in French) and its french translation. The Italian page only has the notice in english and don't even translated it to Italian.
>> 
>> One possibility would be to always display the english sentence and if a translation is available add the translation after the english sentence. Or we could decide to replace the english notice with the translated one altogether.
>> 
> 
> I think we should definitly keep the GPL notice as is. The GNU project
> also is not "supporting" translations,
> see:http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html So if we use a
> translated version we should mark it as unofficial.

It is of course true that the translated versions of the GPL are not official, for legal reasons, and that this is the stance of the FSF.

But we are talking about a GPL notice, not the license itself. This is just a summary including a reference to the actual GPL. So it should be perfectly fine to translate that, as long as we keep the actual license text (in COPYING) in the original english form.

However, we shouldn't let arbitrary people make that translation, as their language and legal skills may vary greatly. I would recommend looking at the *unofficial* GPL translations on <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-translations.html>, and then extract from each (where available) the unofficial translation of the above legal blurb. And provider future translators with a guide for doing so somewhere.


>> 
>> Personally I get the feeling the best would be to add translations for selected credits titles and all non-empty descriptions and paragraphs, and add translation of the GPL notice in addition to the english notice.
>> 
> 
> Personally I rather for leaving the credits untranslated. Otherwise we
> might end up with missing/inconsistent (depending whether the English
> string would be used then or not) contribution descriptions in case
> they are updated.

I can't quite follow the logic here: Don't we risk missing/inconsistent translations *everywhere* anyway? I mean, what is so special about the credits that it is more likely resp. more problematic if they are only partially translated? Maybe I am just missing something here?

To me it seems strange and somewhat arbitrary that we translate everything *except* for the about dialog. At least the section titles could be translated with relatively little work. Thierry suggesting tweaking begin_section to mark sections that should be translated by true, others by false. 



Just my two cents. ANd I also think that if we mean this whole localization business seriously, we should contemplate offering a minimal translated README file for our users -- maybe no need to translate *all*, but at least a minimal blurb for newbies in their mother tongue. Maybe a README.de, README.fr etc. ?


Bye,
Max