[Lazarus] About Arabic translating in Lazarus

Khaled Shagrouni shagrouni at gmail.com
Wed Jun 5 23:00:41 CEST 2013


Hi

I cannot see the point in throwing away all the translations made (94% of
project messages, 7830 translated messages in 62 file) and bring it back to
the situation it was long years ago (4%, 321 messages translated in 1 file)
just because of one person view .

Regarding Arabic translation of technical terms and UI elements there are
two different schools:

1- Traditional (which I believe Mazin represent), this school believes that
all translation must follow the old Arabic language spirit and style and
uses dead vocabularies known one thousand years ago.

2- Modern, which flows with the evolution and development of the language
during last decade. And it is de facto now.

The followers of the traditional school will not agree on the concept of
“Modern Arabic” and afraid that The Arabic language will split in two
parts. (Also there is a nationalism and religion issues). But this is the
life and most of the languages experienced such evolution, the result of
this school translation will be weird and sometimes funny (imagine a
software UI in Shakespearean Language).

I am aware that there are a lot of poor quality Arabic translations out
there in some open source projects (weak Arabic, blindly depends on TM/MT,
lack of knowledge on the subject).

Apparently the quality of the translation I submitted is in a question, and
I say it again, because of one person opinion whom had happened to be an
Arabic translation maintainer.

I consider myself good in Arabic language, I am a freelance translator, I
did a lot of translations in different subjects for government and
companies (reports, articles and technical manuals), I am also a software
developer for more than 25 years, and I have two translated books under my
belt on software engineering and Object Pascal.

I did the Lazarus translation with passion; it took me several months, I
even developed my own Po file editor to ease and speed up my work, it just
feel bad seeing my contribution discarded without even bringing the subject
up for discussion with other members before taking this decision.
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