Gender awareness in Hebrew FOSS translations

[Yaron Shahrabani]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Tzafrir Rehan <tzafrir.r at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Since there is a standard, it should be used.
>
But if the user can't understand it and needs a dictionary in order to use
an app this is our failure...
There are places where the standard and popular terms are both pretty
popular I put the popular one in parenthesis, this way the translations are
bit longer (I don't do this quite often) but more usable and more users will
benefit from it without searching the Internet or the dictionary...

> If we disagree with the standard, we should either have it revised, or
> write a standard of our own.
>
I am not the one to disagree, language is spoken by people and people have
habits, some are good some are bad, disagreement to standards and making
them is very popular among modern languages (ever heard of
Dorbanot<http://www.dorbanot.com>?)
living language suffers from the influence of its speakers, the academy
should be more tolerant to the way people talk but instead they are making
more more unusable terms that nobody will want to use (תחפיף, מצלה and so
on)
I think there should be a balance but until then we will have to work for
the users and with the users, otherwise our work is in vain... (besides the
genderless form that should put an end to the discrimination in a relatively
elegant way)
For example: the word מידע is relatively new in the Hebrew language, until
the late 70's the word אינפורמציה was largely used, nowadays the word מידע
is very common and the transliteration form (אינפורמציה) is seldom used

> Either way, jumping to a ad-hoc solution without going through a
> standardization process will not solve the problem, and will only create
> more fragmentation in the field of UI translation.
>
I agree (unless you are talking about using terms different from the
standard just to make the translation usable).
There is a group of kids that translate apps using Google translate, I can't
even describe how awful this is (They don't fix anything, they release it as
is even if the terms doesn't make any sense).

> (The SII will probably also want to update these documents, as in practice
> nobody says שפה כוונת עצם or מנפה when they use a debugger on their object
> oriented language.)
>
תכנות כוון עצמים is not used by the public, This semester I took a Java
programming course, the official name of this course is: תכנות מונחה עצמים,
some call it OOP (I simply call it עצבים) but I heard nobody saying כוונת
עצמים in any context
On the other hand מנפה שגיאות is actually used in many places...
(I even translated this way myself several times...)
Since Windows does not have any built in programming abilities this term was
not used by common users and the programmers allow themselves to use this
term, the academy does not usually use this term but most of my lecturers
are not fluent Hebrew speakers anyway

Everything is negotiable but we all live in a society, we all mingle with
people and talk the language, we should be tolerant and true with ourselves
to know what's right for the general public and what doesn't, this is the
way tact works and its a very basic life skill
Good translator needs life skills, otherwise his translations are no better
than machine translation, you wouldn't count on Google translator when it
comes to an important issue...

Kind regards,
Yaron Shahrabani
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