Talking about translation (Re: Conflicting changes in Russian translation)

[Alexander Sauta]

Andrei, I have agreed with the majority of your arguments and with
Matt's ideas. I am also agree that it was a bit reckless to avoid
precise translation of terms in favor of better sounding in russian.

I'm also ok with your proposals on further work and scripted terms replacement.

Now I insist only on some particular words which became common sense
and are familiar to every programmer for quite a long time. Patch is
one of them. Maybe theoretically transliteration somehow hides a
metaphor behind it - may be,- but I doubt that there is a programmer
who doesn't know what it means. So, for Russian, Chinese, Mexican or
Bora Borean IT person the word "to patch" in corresponding context
directly means "to apply software patch" without any intermediate and
metaphorical levels. Translating it into russian sounds exactly like
translating 'football' (ногомяч).

Yesterday evening I've made a small poll at my job, only 4 persons
were present, but they all said that 'patch' must not be translated.
I'm pretty sure that the internet poll among programmers will give the
same results. I can't imagine anyone ever pronouncing this in other
way.

Wanna play ногомяч? ;)


--
Alexander Sauta



2011/12/10 Andrei Polushin <polushin at gmail.com>:
> 10.12.2011 4:14, Matt Mackall wrote:
>>
>> [a bunch of Russian deleted]
>
> Matt, thank you for valuable participation.
>
>> Says Google Translate:
>>> "In general, my opinion is this: avoid literal translation of the console
>>> versions of all the terms that are not translated in one word adequately,
>>> instead, conveying meaning of the sentence (pull changes - download changes).
>>> [...]
>>
>> I disagree. I really think you should use "<pull>" (тянуть?) in the
>> sense of "pull on an object", because push/pull is a core metaphor that
>> Mercurial uses. If "<download>" was the right answer, then we would have
>> used "download" as the English version. In other words, we've got three
>> layers:
>>
>> [command names] -> [metaphor] -> [underlying concept]
>>
>> ..where in the case of English, <command name> ~= <metaphor>.
>>
>>  'pull' -> 'pull changes' -> 'download the data for new changesets'
>>
>> So 'pull' serves as a literal command name and core jargon. But
>> translating this to:
>>
>>  'pull' -> '<download changes>' -> '<download the data for new
>> changesets>'
>>
>> means the metaphor is lost.
>
> I agree, the whole intent of new vocabulary is to replace transliterated
> words with their Russian equivalents chosen by metaphor.
>
> I guess you mean that we should _consistently_ translate an English term
> with the initially chosen Russian term, so that the reader would recall its
> exact meaning from the translation. I agree again.
>
>
>> Now I get that this may not work for
>> pre-existing terms for pre-Mercurial concepts like 'patch' - there may
>> be an existing well-established Russian word for software patches that
>> doesn't correspond to the 'put a patch on a tire' metaphor, in which
>> case you should use that jargon to avoid confusion.
>
> The translation of 'patch' is a good example of how the whole system of
> metaphors could became broken in a translation.
>
> In English, 'a software patch' was born as a metaphor, as far as I see:
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#History
>
> In Russian we have both the transliteration (which looses metaphor) and the
> literal translation (which preserves the metaphor):
>
>  http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Патч - the article starts with the
>  two words in bold, illustrating that both translation coexist.
>
> Historically, the transliterated word has been widely used by Unix
> professionals, while the metaphorical word is used in certain high quality
> translations (TortoiseSVN) and I'm not aware of any objections to its use.
>
> As I've said, transliterated word looses metaphor completely. The same
> effect is distributed to all related terms, so they could became hardly
> translatable, for example:
>
>  English            |  Russian           | Meaning for Russian
>  -------------------- -------------------- -------------------
>  a patch            -> patch
>  to patch           -> patchit` or propatchit`
>  to apply patch     -> primenit` patch    (I guess)
>  to unapply patches -> razprimenit` patch (I guess, quite bad)
>  to fold patches    -> ?                  (I'm unable to guess)
>  a chunk, a hunk    -> polosa (Russian for 'stripe', ambiguous, bad)
>
> Otherwise, when we stick to metaphorical word, we're just to continue
> building the remaining metaphors:
>
>  English            |  Russian           | Meaning for Russian
>  -------------------- -------------------- -------------------
>  a patch            -> zaplatka           (= patch)
>  to patch           -> zalatyvat`         (= put a patch on clothes)
>  to apply patch     -> nalozhit zaplatku  (= put a patch on smth)
>  to unapply patches -> otorvat` zaplatku  (= to rip it off)
>  to fold patches    -> podshit` zaplatki  (= to sew them)
>  a chunk, a hunk    -> loskut             (= tiny part of textile)
>
> The recent discussion was about choosing the exact word to express metaphor:
>
>  http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2011-November/035827.html
>
>
>> I may be wrong, there may be good reasons and precedent for abandoning
>> our central metaphors when translating. But whatever the right answer is
>> to this issue, I doubt it's specific to Russian. All translators should
>> be on the same page here, which means we need to discuss (and document)
>> it in the project's default language.
>
> OK, we'll like to know more opinions from other language translators too.
>
>
> --
> Andrei Polushin