[hgbook] Italian version available

[Giulio Piancastelli]

Hi there, Stefano! Glad to hear from the person who worked on the
translation of Mercurial itself!

>>> i found a little strange to read the
>>> translation of merge as "unione"
>>> (the svnbook uses "fusione").
>>
>> Indeed, I've checked the SVN book before deciding upon the
>> translation, but I liked the term "unione" better.
>
> I think we should stick with terms already adopted, 'fusione' is weird
> but if svnbook uses it maybe we should use it as well.

I don't think that being the first term to be used says anything about
its quality or whether it is the most apt to the job. I'd like to talk
about these issues rather than following a translation "just because"
it came before. If there is a better word, I don't think I should not
use it "just because" someone else used another word before.

> By the way, speaking with other italians I always use 'merge/fare il merge'.

Please keep doing it, if that's what works for you and your team! At
least, you're not using "mergiare"! ;-)

However, in my opinion, you are not really "talking Italian" there.
It's an Italian sentence where you dropped an English term; I could
argue that it's not even a "technical term", but a common term used in
a technical context, so as such it has a perfectly valid translation
in Italian. (More on this later at the bottom of the message.)

But I think I understand why you're doing it. I believe it's due to
habit, comfort, continuous exposition to the English-based world of
software. The cognitive effort to switch language in your head just
isn't worth the "correct" use of the corresponding Italian term. This
is OK when you are speaking e.g. to a co-worker, but I think that
things work differently in writing/translating.

> Moreover, I just took a quick glance and if I'm not wrong you use
> terms as 'changeset'.

Changeset posed an interesting challenge. Its (literal) translation is
easy to find ("insieme di modifiche", for example), but it has two
defects: 1) is composed by three words, and 2) is long. Using the
regular Italian translation would have made the prose more difficult
to read in some places, since the term is used quite frequently;
incidentally, it would have cluttered the "message interface" of hg
log and such, too. So, considering that the term is not present in a
regular English dictionary (e.g. you can check the Merriam-Webster
online) -- thus giving it the status of a "technical term" lookalike
(as opposed to "common term", see above) -- and being unable to come
up with a good translation (by the meaning of "good" just explained) I
decided to keep the original English term.

>>> Did you consider putting the english
>>>  term next to the italian one for the
>>> tecnical words?
>
> I second this, a lot of users use only the english terms.

I will consider putting the English term near the first occurrence of
the Italian term in the merge chapter of the book. If you (or anyone
else) find the same kind of issue somewhere else, please point it out,
on Bitbucket or with a direct email, thanks.

>> (e.g. pull as "estrarre" and push as
>> "trasmettere" in Chapter 2).
>
> In the current hg translation I used 'fare pull/fare push', why don't
> we try to agree upon a common terminology?

Ah, yes. I have looked at the Italian translation of Mercurial while
translating the code snippets. I used some parts of it, but I changed
(in the book) the parts that I didn't like.

As an example, I used "aggiungo" for "adding" everywhere, while you
used "sto aggiungendo" instead; even if the verb tense in your
translation is literally more correct, using a shorter, single word is
more immediate, and in the case of the software operations the
different tense does not change the user perception of what the
program is doing or when the program is doing what it's doing.

As another example, you kept using "tag" instead of "etichetta"; this
is, in my opinion, another instance of a common term used in a
technical context, so I would like to see it translated, also given
that the translation is just... perfect (i.e. it's not an
edge/difficult case such as changeset before).

However, I will try to expand on my opinion about "fare
pull/push/merge" replying to another message, which addresses directly
this issue.

Regards,
Giulio Piancastelli