We have opened a specific Esperanto Haiku user group in Telegram here: https://t.me/haiku_os_eo. Mostly we are busy with translating the Haiku UI into Esperanto.
However, we ran into a problem where we have to create a guide for translators; a table that lists most common terms and their appropriate translation. Some terms can have more than one valid translation; others can be translated in several ways; and there are terms that simply don’t exist, so we have to create our owns.
For example,
Should we translate “byte” as “bitoko” or as “bajto”? Both are correct, both appear in the dictionaries, but for the sake of unification we have to settle on one of them.
Do we translate “replicant” as “replikanto”, “replikaĵo”, “replikilo” or “repliko”?
What are the proper translations for Deskbar and Tracker? Or for Deskbar Shelf? It is not “notification area”, as in Windows; it is shelf…
This page has to be located in a some well-known place, preferably at the Haiku web site itself or in the Pootle, because every new translator has to get acquainted to it before starting their translation attempts.
I think that you need to have Esperanto added here https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/i18n . Then like on each language page, there will be a link for a terminology page.
What you will decide to put in boxes, I think that are open questions for your Telegram group. Once you agreed on something, just put it there and ask people to refer to that page when they are translating.
To help you in decisions, you can also see what other systems/environments are doing.
For example, Esperanto translation of GNOME project happens here https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/eo/
I guess that you could contact team leader and ask for some advices.
Hey, I didn’t know that! I guess every day’s a school day…
How did you create that pootle-terminology.catkeys file. I just tried to upload in ‘catkeys’ format, but Pootle chides me:
Unsupported filetype ‘pootle-terminology.catkeys’, only PO files are supported at this time
I really have no idea. When I showed up for the translations, it was already there. Probably in the past .catkeys format was also supported, but nowadays they probably deprecated it and push .po format only.
It’s a bit unconvenient for this usage that the Terminology pages are in each local language.
In the case of the French translation:
replicant is translated as replicant. I think the word originally comes from Blade Runner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicant), so how is that trnaslated there?
Tracker and Deskbar keep their “trademark” name because they were always called like that by French people and there is no reason to change it, and translations would feel clumsy, especially for Deskbar. Deskbar isn’t an existing english word .
Shelf is translated as “Cartouche” which is the word for the information block on technical drawing that lays in a corner and I think related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartouche . It has no connexion to the word used in English, and doesn’t have to as long as the image it conveys makes sense. Even in English, for example in Windows the equivalent of the shelf is called a tray.
In one of the famous russian translations of BeOS 5 user guide, Deskbar was translated as “Crowbar” (“лом”, — because they both are bars, and Deskbar in BeOS is just as handy as is a crowbar in a street fight), and Tracker — “Pathfinder” or “Ranger” (“следопыт”, — roughly “one that knows how to read animals’ tracks”).
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