discuss: Some ideas on General Style
Subject:
Re: Some ideas on General Style
From:
Nicolas Chauvat ####@####.####
Date:
15 Apr 2002 07:55:17 -0000
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0204150943260.27857-100000@aries.logilab.fr>
> Seriously -- the logical conclusion of this approach is to produce all
> LDP documentation in Basic English (<1000-word vocabulary), as one can
> never predict the extent of any other reader's vocabulary -- nor can any
> 'average' vocabulary ever be estimated.
> This would seriously impede production of any documents at all.
> Besides which, what is the LDP translation effort for?
> And are the translated documents restricted in their use of vocabulary
> for the same reasons? (I think not.)
You're a good man :-)
> I disagree very strongly with the idea that Linux (or any other
> form of intellectual endeavour) should be restricted to expressing
> itself in one language only; and I have no problem whatsoever with any
> ab initio contribution being made to the general knowledge pool in any
> language at all.
> (In other words, I strongly disagree with Anglo-centric attitudes in
> what is effectively a global enterprise.)
>
> I would certainly not expect anyone contributing in French, German,
> Dutch, etc. to restrict their vocabulary for any other reason than
> clarity of meaning -- so why would I do so myself?
>
> And I'm far too much of a natural teacher to be prepared to dumb-down my
> language skills when writing for an English-language readership.
>
> Perhaps this is something on which the LDP team should make a collective
> decision?
> (Personally I'm far more concerned with whether writers can distinguish
> between plurals and genitives or not.)
I couldn't agree more.
FWIW, the french LDP team is currently discussing moving to fr.tldp.org
and integrating more tightly with en.tldp.org. David (Merril), we would
like to get access to "your" database, be able to add a table of
translators, generate HTML progress reports from the result of SQL
queries, send announces of documents updates to mailing-lists, etc. That's
a short-term goal (weeks).
A longer-term goal (months) is for french-speaking documentation authors
to contribute documents written in french and have french-speaking (not
necessarily native) translators translate them in english to make them
available for a wider audience.
On this list, we quite often discussed simplifying the input format of the
documents, in order to ease the life of contributors. But to many, writing
in english is a high fence to jump, hence accepting documents from several
languages and having translators to english (or directly other languages),
would IMHO help increase the number of authors, the number documents and
the quality of documents. If I speak french only but can get help to
improve my document by communicating with chinese contributors via the LDP
and its translators, that's a good thing, isn't it?
--
Nicolas Chauvat
http://www.logilab.com - "Mais où est donc Ornicar ?" - LOGILAB, Paris (France)
