[hgbook] Italian version available

[Martin Geisler]

Giulio Piancastelli <giulio.piancastelli at gmail.com> writes:

First of all -- well done on the book! It must have been a huge effort
to translate so much, congratulations on getting it done.

> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Paolo Berto<pberto at jupiter-jazz.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the terminology should be the *exact same* used by the
>> english version of mercurial. So merge is merge, and "fare un merge"
>> is correct from my point of view ("fare una unione" would be
>> confusing from the usability side).
>
> I assume we're talking about the software here, not (only) the book.
> However, I do not agree.
>
> What's a message doing on your screen when you issue a command? It
> typically explains what the software is doing. Now, suppose that there
> is a command XYZ, and you don't know what the meaning of the word XYZ
> is in the language that the software is written in. Keeping XYZ
> everywhere in a translation does not help the user to understand.
> Suppose the user issues "hg XYZ"... he probably expects the message to
> give him a hint at what operation the command is performing, but if
> the message just says "I'm doing a XYZ" the user is just as blind and
> confused as it was before. It's like you ask "What does XYZ mean?" and
> the software answers "It means 'do a XYZ'!" You can clearly see that
> this does not help. Instead, translating terms where it's possible
> gives a more comfortable environment to non-native English speakers,
> who presumably decided to switch the UI language exactly because they
> do not speak English fluently (or at all). Mixing Italian and English
> words too much is going to add confusion, it just "sounds wrong" to
> the Italian-only speaker, thus it should be very limited across an
> internationalized software.

Let me just say I agree. Many of the words used in Mercurial are normal
words which were obviously chosen because they have a normal meaning
that we can transfer to the software. We want people to think of the
*normal* meaning first, and then transfer that meaning to the software.

So words like "update", "pull", "tag", and "bookmark" are nice everyday
words and I much prefer to see them translated when explaining them.
Using proper Danish words (in my case) also means that I don't have to
commit lots of ugly grammar mistakes -- what's the proper Danish plural
form of the English word "changeset"? Nobody knows... :-)

As you point out in another mail, the word "changeset" is difficult
since it doesn't exist. I just tried searching for it in Google, the
first hit was this page:

  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangeSet   really! :-)

I've translated it as 'ændring' ('change' in English) as I think of a
'changeset' as a big change that brings the repository from one state to
another (by applying a set of changes to some files...).

Having said that, I must of course admit that I also speak a mixture of
Danish and English when talking about Mercurial with others. But I
dislike doing so :-)

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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