Nynorsk translation does not follow the language guidelines

I see that you only talk about the install process. Are you sure that this bug affects the majority of Norwegian translations?

Norwegian translators: do you think you could have a look at this bug? Thanks!

I found non-conforming translations in following packages (packages from Launchpad's translation system):
- update-notifier
- language-selector
- debian-installer

And I didn't check for more.

Non-conformaties incluce:
- Not ending all infinitives with -a
- Kontrollér, installér etc. in imperative
- «å bli» in stead of «å verta»
- One case of not having full adjective conjugation. («dei er vorte vist» instead of «dei er vorte viste» etc.)

Being a member of upstream GNOME translations who makes an effort to be conforming with the guidelines, it is annoying to see differention from Ubuntu's camp as it is very noticeable for end users when the grammar isn't consistent.

El dt 24 de 08 de 2010 a les 18:53 +0000, en/na Torstein A. W. va
escriure:
> I found non-conforming translations in following packages (packages from Launchpad's translation system):
> - update-notifier
> - language-selector
> - debian-installer
>
> And I didn't check for more.
>
> Non-conformaties incluce:
> - Not ending all infinitives with -a
> - Kontrollér, installér etc. in imperative
> - «å bli» in stead of «å verta»
> - One case of not having full adjective conjugation. («dei er vorte vist» instead of «dei er vorte viste» etc.)
>

Torstein,

Thanks a lot for this, the more detailed the info, the easier it is to
fix things.

> Being a member of upstream GNOME translations who makes an effort to be
> conforming with the guidelines, it is annoying to see differention from
> Ubuntu's camp as it is very noticeable for end users when the grammar
> isn't consistent.
>

I agree that consistency and quality are important in translations, and
I especially thank you for providing precise feedback. On the occasions
that we receive complaints about the quality of a certain translation in
a given language, it happens too often that that's all we get, so I
think it is awesome that you've gone a step forward and pointed at the
things that need changing. Only this way we can move forward and things
get fixed if necessary.

Regarding guidelines, you are mentioning you are using these for GNOME
translations:

  http://i18n.skolelinux.no/retningslinjer.html

The Norwegian Ubuntu translation team has also got guidelines listed in
https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/ubuntu-translators, which
point to:

  http://ubuntu.no/oversetting

Ubuntu Translators: perhaps it would be good to add a link to the
skolelinux guidelines in that page?

Finally, in terms of collaboration (if it's not already the case), I
think it would be good if at least some members shared teams, that is,
that they contribute both upstream and downstream, which quite often is
just a matter of keeping communication.

Thanks!

--
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella

Thanks for posting this bug. Annoying for translators, these non-conformities are also lowering the feel of quality of Ubuntu. Some of them are specific for the Skulelinux guidelines (a/e infinitive and bli/verte), others are incorrect grammar in general (accent in imperative and lacking full adjective conjugation). The guideline specific ones are by far more frequent.

http://ubuntu.no/oversetting which the team overview points to, also points further to the Skulelinux guidelines. The page at ubuntu.no is a quick overview for translators, containing resources such as the guidelines, a dictionary, mailing lists and a list of common grammatical errors done by translators. This list could include these cases above, be more descriptive and provide examples of correct and incorrect language. Also with some encouragement to fix or notify someone with the errors you find in Ubuntu. I'll start writing on this.

Regarding upstream and downstream, I've seen some members in both Ubuntu and other projects, the GNOME project among others. Is there any overview of applications, their teams and pages?

There is an overview over all GNOME applications and members here http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/no for Norwegian (both variants)

After this being brought up, I am in the process of updating some of the webpages mentioned here.

- The team page for the Norwegian Ubuntu Translators team is now a short overview in english of what the ubuntu.no/oversetting page will look like.
- ubuntu.no/oversetting will soon get some updates to be even clearer about not translating programs translated by upstream projects.

1) I think reviewing the whole Ubuntu installation for bad nynorsk translations will take too much time and be too unspecific. Should we perhaps make bugs per program where bad/inconsistent translations are spotted?

2) Or is it possible to download all po files (nn.po) and grep for known bad phrases? (-e infinitives are impossible to spot with grep like this, and has to be done by real human eyes)

I will switch to nynorsk for my installations to see if I can spot some of these problems, but do not rely on it, I am not that good at nynorsk.

3) Is it possible to see which programs' translations differ most from their upstream translations?

1) It will indeed be time consuming. If the preferred way of fixing bad translations is correcting them upstream, having bug reports is perhaps no bad idea. It's a cumbersome work flow, but that's what Launchpad currently allows.

2) You can download the translation in launchpad as a PO-file. The verb «bli» and the accents should be easy targets for grepping. However, I'm seeing some lacking adjective conjugations in the 1614 string long debian-installer, which means the entire template could need some reviewing. How should we prioritize this? Incorrect language isn't specific for just the installation process.

3) Yes. https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/Guide#Translation statistics

Thanks for the list, Torstein. As one of the members, can you tell us if there's any need for more contributors at the GNOME project?

Sorry for late reply. I have always forgot to go here when I were at the computer.

Nynorsk do require help. We are only 2-3 people who are contributing relatively often, and we fall behind after every release sadly.

Bokmål is in a better situation due to Kjartan.

If you'd like to help Nynorsk out, it would be greatly appreciated. Just send a mail to <email address hidden> and say you're interested in translating GNOME upstream and you'll get instructions and access to GNOME's translation software, «Damned lies».

Asking for help with words etc. at either <email address hidden>, or the specific <email address hidden> / <email address hidden> is also encouraged.to get things consistent and added to «Fellesordboka».

The page ubuntu.no/oversetting is now updated and rewritten to match all the errors pointed out.

I'll send an information mail shortly on our mailing list, requesting some volunteers. First, we should make clear how language bugs should be reported to the upstream team. Torstein, could you give your view on how posting them as bug reports in launchpad would work? One bug report for each template, no matter how few errors there are?

If there are no issues with bug flooding then that's the most systematic approach. Another way is that the investigator, if they find it appropriate and gone through several whole translation files with few/no errors, put them together in a bug report. For instance if they gone through program Foo and found 2 errors and gone through Bar and found more errors make one bug report for both with both program names in the title.

The first approach is best if there's no issue of bug report flooding I think. Then it is easier to search, find and add more errors in the comments if new investigators find more to fix plus it is more systematic and make less confusion.

If I understand it correctly, this affects mostly the Ubuntu-specific applications. In this case, my suggestion would be:

1. Make a list of all applications that need reviewing:
Some tips on how to start:
- Nearly all applications in the first page at https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+lang/nn are Ubuntu-specific
- In the statistics, purple means that translations have been done in Launchpad, but not yet sent upstream. See the pitivi template for an example.

2. Coordinate the work that needs to be done:
- Identify the main inconsistencies with the standard and see if they can be corrected with a simple substitution script. If not, they'll have to be reviewed manually. Note that even if automated substitution takes you 90% of the way, you might need to review the final translation manually as well.
- From the list of translation templates to check you've compiled, assign each template to a team member for review. I'd recommend simply using the wiki
- Decide whether you'll need some more infrastructure for the review effort. My advice to keep things simple would be to use the wiki and fix everything at once for a single template at a time. I think it makes no sense to start filing bugs about translations inconstencies when they can just be fixed at once. Once the review process for all translations has finished, it might make sense to file particular bugs for issues that might have escaped the review. You can file them in the ubuntu-translations project and we'll assign them to the Norwegian team, or you could even register your own project in Launchpad and use the bug tracker for this (e.g. ubuntu-translations-qa-nn)

3. Execute the work - make sure translations are sent upstream as well (in your particular case, in most cases the upstream will be Ubuntu or a project in Launchpad, but in others it might be GNOME)

4. Make sure that in the future translators follow all the same standard and keep a fluent communitcation with upstreams (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/Upstream)

Some other tips:
- You can download the PO file for a single file or for all Ubuntu and languages at once (no per-language download, sorry). Here you can see how: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/Upstream#General%20contribution%20guidelines)
- If there are translations that need to be sent upstream, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/Upstream to find out where upstream is. If you can't find it, you can simply ask on the translators list (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/Contact/#General%20discussion)
- In general, I'd also recommend sending e-mail to the ubuntu-translators mailing list whenever you need advice. There are a lot of experienced translators from other teams there, and they are always willing to help!

I hope you find this useful.

Regards,
David.

Just subscribing Norwegian translators to see if this issue has been fixed.