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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2024 13:30:44 +0000
> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>, Vincent Belaïche 
> <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
> 
> > If chunks were sentences, that would be impractical, indeed.  But I
> > very much doubt that this is a good idea for translating manuals
> > (message catalogs use short phrases because most messages in programs
> > are themselves short phrases or single sentences).  Translating a
> > sentence out of its context is much harder than translating a whole
> > paragraph, because different languages have different ways of
> > explaining technical issues, and a good translation might well require
> > rearrange or rewrite sentences.
> 
> Indeed. But “marking” sentences does not mean that they can’t be 
> translated by using different structures. A practical example for that 
> is when translating 2 sentences with one sentence with two parts 
> separated by a comma.
> 
> Also, translating a sentence never happens out of its context. There is 
> the sentence before and the sentence after and all are visually present 
> during the translation. So it’s easy for the translator to take the 
> context into account.

If context is important when translating technical documentation (and
it is IME), then any change in a paragraph will in many cases affect
more than the sentence corresponding to the one modified in English.

Moreover, a good translation of a paragraph will in many cases produce
a translated paragraph without 1:1 correspondence between sentences.
So changes in the original will need to consider much more than a
single sentence anyway.

> I understand that you have some translating experience, but I am not 
> sure that we see the same issues.
> 
> > So my initial thinking was that whole paragraphs, and sometimes more,
> > should be marked as a unit.  And that is much more practical than
> > marking short phrases or single sentences.
> 
> I’m not sure I understand what kind of marks you envision. Paragraphs 
> are already marked by surrounding empty lines.

I mean, for example, give each paragraph a number, like so:

@node Display Margins
  @subsection Displaying in the Margins
  @cindex display margins
  @cindex margins, display

  @c para 1234
    A buffer can have blank areas called @dfn{display margins} on the
  left and on the right.  Ordinary text never appears in these areas,
  but you can put things into the display margins using the
  @code{display} property.  There is currently no way to make text or
  images in the margin mouse-sensitive.

  @c para 1235
    The way to display something in the margins is to specify it in a
  margin display specification in the @code{display} property of some
  text.  This is a replacing display specification, meaning that the
  text you put it on does not get displayed; the margin display appears,
  but that text does not.

  @c para 1236
    A margin display specification looks like @code{((margin
  right-margin) @var{spec})} or @code{((margin left-margin) @var{spec})}.
  Here, @var{spec} is another display specification that says what to
  display in the margin.  Typically it is a string of text to display,
  or an image descriptor.

When paragraph #1234 in the English original was modified, translators
will know that they need to update the translation of the
corresponding paragraph(s) (could be more than one) in their
translations, and nothing else.  It should be easy to analyze the
diffs, look for the "@c para NNNN" marks, and present the translator
with the corresponding paragraph(s) from the translation.