[hgbook] Italian version available

[Stefano Tortarolo]

2009/9/18 Giulio Piancastelli <giulio.piancastelli at gmail.com>:
> In this sense, a possible fault of the translation is not the use of
> "changeset" as you pointed out in a previous message, but the use of
> "hook" and "template". *These* are much harder to explain, if not by
> the translator's fault in finding a good Italian term to use as a
> substitute (or accepting the less-than-average terms found). Have I
> mentioned that translating is hard? ;-)

Yes, I agree with you.. The whole point of my previous mail was to
avoid very bad translations such as 'kernel' -> 'nucleo' (i.e.,
Sistemi Operativi di Silberschatz).

> However, for completeness, I'd like to note how, in paper publishing,
> even the change of terms in the translation of two different editions
> of the same book is not annotated at all. Case in point, Learning
> Python: one edition used "descrizioni" for list comprehensions, the
> following edition used "espressioni", but there's nowhere to be noted
> that readers may have already got used to the previous term instead,
> since that's what made "the literature" until the new edition hit the
> shelves.

In my opinion that's a quite big fault on their side, then.

>> I agree with you, but we need to take in consideration the fact that
>> lots (most?) of our users have to deal with the English terms as well,
>> that's why I still believe that keeping the English terms, along with
>> the Italian ones, would be the best solution. What I'm suggesting here
>> is to use Italian terms, without hiding completely the English ones.
>> This could be a fair compromise, I guess.
>
> I'm considering it, as the opened issue shows. However, let me say
> (again) that the English term is not completely hidden, because it's
> still used *on the command line*, where you can't use anything else.
> There's the command, hg merge; and then there's a chapter, in Italian,
> that talks about that command, referencing it as "hg merge" of course,
> and explaining in Italian what that command does. So, since the book
> language is Italian, and the explanation of the command's
> functionality is in Italian, the translator uses "unire" instead of
> "merge" in the book's text.

Ok, it's good for me.

> If you plan to still work on Mercurial's translation, you may check
> the book for other translations of more messages. There are some that
> got their very first translation in the book, because the i18n file
> for it was missing them. I can't really remember the details, but I
> think that a comparison is in order for the (next?) person who'll work
> on the software translation.

Honestly, on my todo list there are other things more important, at
least for me, (rebase) I'd like to focus on.
However, the it.po file is there for anyone willing to contribute.

>> The main point in translating a command line-based software like
>> mercurial is to ensure that new users will be able to use a specific
>> command correctly, even though their English skills are very low. In
>> order to achieve this, in my opinion it's very important to keep a
>> strong relation between the Italian translation and the actual hg
>> command.
>
> To me, this is achieved by explaining what the command does, as
> clearly as possible, *in Italian*.

Ok.

Stefano