[Kde-games-devel] A problematic translation

[Luciano Montanaro]

Il Friday 14 December 2007 16:18:17 Caio Begotti ha scritto:
> On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:20:55 +0100
>
> Luciano Montanaro <mikelima at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I see German and French have the same problem as Italian. So I say
> > let's add context comments for the ambiguous cases (IE when the
> > word appears alone) for next version...
>
> I'd say that's not a problem, at all. Languages are different, just
> it. Portuguese shares this as well, we have 'jogo' for the abstract
> 'game' and 'partida' for 'play a match'.
>
> AFAIK, 'jogo' came from Latin (ludos) an it does mean exactly
> that, and 'partida' came from a verb to specify the act of playing a
> sort of game for a given time.
>
> Your idea about adding context comments is the best to avoid
> mistakes by some translator. I suppose any speaker of a given Romance
> language (like French, Italian and Portuguese, for instance) can
> distinguish both meanings easily anyway.
>
> PS: I didn't know that German has 2 words for that too :)

The main problem is that sometimes the same message is reused in two contexts.
So, regardless of the chosen translation, one of the contexts will be wrong.

But even when messages are not shared, there is not always enough context to 
distinguish, and since translators do not always have means to test the 
translation, having a clarifying comment would be a good idea 
anyway. "(Match)" could be a good comment for those cases.

Luciano