Relicensing pt_BR translation file

[Theodore Tso]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 05:02:08PM -0300, Wagner Bruna wrote:
> 
> Of course. Bad message subject on my part; I never actually considered
> a license change for the whole file, only for the translation work
> itself.

It's not clear that "the translation work itself" is something which
_can_ be copyrighted.  In general, you can't copyright anything which
could be mechanically generated.  Consider the translation

      "File not found" --> "Archivo no encontrado"

It was generated using Google Translation tools, and as a machine
translation, there's nothing creative about it.  But if you take
something which is much more complicated, say:

"internal error: couldn't lookup EA block record for %u"

being translated to:

"błąd wewnętrzny: nie można znaleźć rekordu bloku EA dla %u"

It's a derived work of a GPL'ed string, so the translation is also
going to be infected by the GPL.  There really isn't a good way to
separate out "the translation" from "the original work".

> Interestingly, in practice most reusable translations would deal with
> very small, and thus not subject to copyright, strings...

... and the problem is that the translation of very small strings may
not be copyrightable at all, since there are very few ways of
translating small strings such as "file not found", and if there's
only one (or a few) ways to do the transaction, and it could be found
via a machine translation system, it's not copyrightable either....

    	      		  	       	   		 - Ted