[Xfce-i18n] [patch] Re: mcs-manager dialog too wide

[Adriano Winter Bess]

Moving to xfce-i18n...

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 11:55:10PM +0900, Daichi Kawahata wrote:
> I'm stick with the length given by the original sentence as
> much as possible believing that it's the planned length to
> fit the interface, so a trial and error only happens in that
> limited spaces for me basically.

I guess this is what most translators try to do, at least I do ;)
Unfortunatelly, sometimes it's just really not possible, and I see two main
reasons for this.

The first one is related to the fact that some words don't have a proper
translation into another language. For example, for the "Window Manager Tweaks"
plugin, there's no optimal translation for "Tweaks" in pt_BR. Anything trying to
be close to it in pt_BR will sound so informal or so jargon that I doubt it more
than 5% of people will know what it means. Of course, this is just a
particularity of a specific locale, and it's the translator job to find the best
way to describe the same thing. In this case, sometimes labels get a little
bigger than the original and it's defintelly hard to avoid. (OK, maybe for the
Window Manager Tweaks it would be better another - shorter - name in english or
even integration with the already existing Window Manager plugin).

The second one is related to the fact that some words/expressions are expected
to be translated in a specific way, even if the translator could think of a
shorter or "better" way. For example, for the "Workspaces and Margins" plugin,
every single desktop environment I know translates "Workspaces" as "Áreas de
Trabalho" in pt_BR. It's much bigger than the original (almost twice as big),
but for consistency issues I'm not likely to translate it to anything else nor
come up with my own "invented" translation.

Regards,
Adriano
-- 
Adriano Winter Bess

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