Language Abkhazian

l10n
#1

Здравствуйте!

Прошу Вас добавить абхазский язык для перевода
Libre Office ver. 4.3.3.2

Add Language  Abkhazian

Abkhazian  ISO 639-1 Code  ab

or

Abkhazian   ISO 639-1 Code  abk

С уважением,
Андрей Абухба
aabuchba@mail.ru

#2

Hi and welcome,

Здравствуйте!

Прошу Вас добавить абхазский язык для перевода
Libre Office ver. 4.3.3.2

Could you write in English? it will be much more easier for us to help
you :slight_smile:
Thanks
Sophie

#3

I think Andrey wanted us to add Abkhazian language to Pootle. I've
just done that.(Probably he cannot write in English, and will
translate LibreOffice from Russian to Abkhazian, but I don't know for
sure.) Anyway, welcome Andrey, and you can start translating
LibreOffice 4.3 UI in Pootle.

Best regards,
Andras

#4

Hi,

2014.11.02 21:10, Andras Timar wrote:

Здравствуйте!

Прошу Вас добавить абхазский язык для перевода
Libre Office ver. 4.3.3.2

Could you write in English? it will be much more easier for us to help
you :slight_smile:

I think Andrey wanted us to add Abkhazian language to Pootle. I've
just done that.(Probably he cannot write in English, and will
translate LibreOffice from Russian to Abkhazian, but I don't know for
sure.) Anyway, welcome Andrey, and you can start translating
LibreOffice 4.3 UI in Pootle.

Andras, you're definitely right that he asked us to do that. I know
Russian, I can reply Andrey offlist.

Rimas

#5

Hi

> Hi and welcome,
>> Здравствуйте!
>>
>> Прошу Вас добавить абхазский язык для перевода
>> Libre Office ver. 4.3.3.2
>
> Could you write in English? it will be much more easier for us to help
> you :slight_smile:
> Thanks
> Sophie
>

I think Andrey wanted us to add Abkhazian language to Pootle. I've
just done that.(Probably he cannot write in English, and will
translate LibreOffice from Russian to Abkhazian, but I don't know for
sure.) Anyway, welcome Andrey, and you can start translating
LibreOffice 4.3 UI in Pootle.

Ha great! Thanks Andras. Andrey let us know which language is preferred for
you so we know who to ping to help you if you need it.
Cheers
Sophie

#6

Hi :slight_smile:

Going off-topic (now that the original question has been solved), hopefully
just briefly ...

Of course Firefox (and many others) allows add-ons such as
machine-translators. They are getting much better but are still
hilariously bad quite often. Often they give just enough of a hint that i
think i understand what someone is saying although i always wonder if they
have sent me off in a wrong direction.

My MT (i think "Quick translate"), gave me;
"Hello!
I ask you to add the Abkhaz language for translation
Libre Office ver. 4.3.3.2
"
Which made a lot of sense and it's good to have a respectable human confirm
that because it gives me a little more confidence in the MT.

I've often wondered if they might be "good enough" to get rough
translations done well enough for humans to proof-read and polish? Perhaps
just "good enough" to use alongside the human translators own skill and
knowledge, perhaps to get some inspiration? Perhaps better for people who
are only just starting to translate things?

I've also wondered if it's easier to have paired teams. So in this case
someone who is a native Russian-speaker but understands Abkhazian "well
enough" to do first drafts and then a native Abkhazian-speaker to do
proof-reading, ideally one who understands Russian (or English or
something) just well enough to be able to look back at a source document to
double-check that things haven't gone too far off-track.

Does either of those ideas have any validity? Are they something that
noobs or laymen often seem to think but turns out to be more work and/or
less accurate than whatever different ways your teams use?

Err, i am a typical English person and only understand 1 language at all
and not even that great at that 1 so please forgive my noobishness in this
post.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#7

I've often wondered if they might be "good enough" to get rough translations done well enough for humans to proof-read and polish?

If you've read the manuals for products that are made in China, to be
sold in North America, you've seen how good machine translation is.

just "good enough" to use alongside the human translators own skill and knowledge, perhaps to get some inspiration?

As an author, the most useful function of machine translation, is to
round trip text through three or four languages. If the resulting output
retains the message that was intended, albeit not the vocabulary, then
the writing is "good".

Perhaps better for people who are only just starting to translate things?

For quick and dirty work, where the user won't ascribe the quality of
the translation to whatever is being described, machine translation is a
good starting point.

Does either of those ideas have any validity?

Professional translators prefer to translate material into their native
language, because it provides for better (qualitatively speaking) accuracy.

jonathon

  * English - detected
  * English

  * English

<javascript:void(0);>

#8

It's ok for trying to get the gist of some text in a hurry but even 12 years into being a translator, I find translation much faster than proofreading. Not sure why that is cognitively but I think because you have to keep jumping - first you read the target, then the source and then you fix the target but have to keep checking. The longer the sentence, the more you need to check and if it's a whole paragraph, you get really frustrated trying to match up the bits of sentence that go together. Whereas when I translate, I read the source, I punch in the translation, done. Sometimes you need to check or re-read the source if it was written by a developer on speed but on the whole, the number of strings you can translate without going back and forth is much higher.

So I don't think we'd save anything in translators' terms but perhaps other translators work differently?

Michael

02/11/2014 22:03, sgrìobh Tom Davies:

#9

Hi :slight_smile:
Thanks Jonathon (Toki?) and Michael :slight_smile: That solved all my questions.

It also seems to match what other people have said in bits&bobs in the
archives but those 2 answers seem to gather plenty of the ideas neatly.
Thanks! :))

Language is too complex for MTs to really understand imo. Nuances,
implications, hidden meanings and echoes of previous uses of certain
phrases are some of the barriers that i think MTs are never going to be
able to fully cope with.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#10

Þann sun 2.nóv 2014 22:03, skrifaði Tom Davies:

I've often wondered if they might be "good enough" to get rough
translations done well enough for humans to proof-read and polish? Perhaps
just "good enough" to use alongside the human translators own skill and
knowledge, perhaps to get some inspiration? Perhaps better for people who
are only just starting to translate things?

Don't forget that there may be licensing issues for using machine generated translations; e.g. google-translate sure has some limitations on what is to be regarded as "personal or fair use".

Regards,

Sveinn í Felli

#11

Hi,
Let me chime in here as well. First of all, Pootle has the ability to use a configured TM. Couple options available out of the box are Google Translate (which is an MT, not a TM service) and Aperture (which, if I remember correctly, holds a collection of translated strings from a large amount of open source software, and can suggest these translations to you). In addition to this, there's apparently a lookup feature as well, with an example config for Wikipedia. I'm not sure why we aren't using any of these at the moment, but I guess we could turn them on, if needed.

However, none of these features are even close to being a replacement for a real human localizer being at the moment. They are mere helpers, and nothing more. Surely, the level of accuracy varies by language, but considering other replies, I guess even translations into English are bad enough. As a user, I sometimes stumble upon software, which is "localized" into Lithuanian using Google Translate (or something very similar). Tell you what: on these cases I feel insulted by the idiocy of that app's "localizer", because that person obviously didn't know at all what they were doing and how shitty the outcome of their "effort" is. I can't tell for sure that that outcome isn't helpful, but I really doubt that it is. So, to summarize my point, we should never attempt to seed any locale with machine translations. These are a good helper mechanism, but a bad base to start building up on.

By the way, writing this also reminded me of Google's Code-In programme and what we should learn from it. GCI is similar to Google Summer Of Code, but targets younger students to whom the participating projects assign smaller than GSOC tasks. Among them, localization tasks were also acceptable. So, some students quickly found a way to easily cash out the rewards offered for completing these tasks, by using MT services. What's worth learning from this is that there should always be a mentor within a project who understands the target language well enough to at least tell whether it looks like a result of MT. Otherwise it's just a waste of rewards and its reputation.

Regards,
Rimas

#12

Yes, this is quite handy, we have that activated over on the Mozilla pootle.

Sometimes the suggestions *are* useless as you said (we had to ask the people who did the TM to block anything from Ubuntu until we had completed the re-translation there, it was THAT bad) but on the whole, it saves quite a lot of time on repetitive stuff.

Michael

03/11/2014 07:26, sgrìobh Rimas Kudelis:

#13

Hi :slight_smile:
Yes, definitely only as a helper NOT as a replacement! However, looking
back through the archives suggests that Michael is not the only one who
finds that trying to use an MT actually slows him down and is more of a
hindrance than a help.

I've not encountered TM before, i will have to look it up.

Errr, i thought Pootle and other things were more helpful in having some
sort of database where humans could look-up phrases and see how other
humans had translated them. Still lacks context so nuances and such could
still be dodgy. Is that how "fuzzy string"s appear?

If Pootle doesn't have some functionality switched on then it's probably
for a very good reason and has probably been discussed and decided before.
I haven't checked the archives and probably wont have time to either,
sorry! :frowning:

The main response i seem to be getting is that MTs are only good in a very
limited way and probably only for very occasional use but it's really down
to individual translators and which languages are being translated to or
from.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#14

That's what I meant with TM - translation memory :slight_smile:

Michael

03/11/2014 09:36, sgrìobh Tom Davies:

#15

Hi :slight_smile:
Ahh, thanks :)) That has solved 2 questions in one answer!
Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile: