So, for the past year or so I have been hacking away at an amateur Esperanto translation.
I’m not a professional translator so I’m sure there are many things wrong with it. However, for the most part, I think it could be a significant building block for a proper translation™.
It’s almost 700 tiddlers (of the 1000). I think at some point the TiddlyWiki I was working in got updated which may result in some missing translations etc. but the gist is there.
For the most part, I am happy for people to make merge requests to add new translations or make fixes. However, I think that most changes should be discussed to get a consensus first. That way 1. we can be sure it’s a helpful change 2. we can update all instances of that change throughout the language plug-in at once for consistency.
Change suggestions and discussions can be facilitated by creating an issue.
If you notice anything really obviously wrong, feel free to make a merge request fixing it. An example of something like that would be vestigial English text accidentally left behind along side the Esperanto text.
Although this MVP leaves a lot wanting, there are elements which I feel strongly about to varying degrees.
Actions should be imperatives. To date, many Esperanto UI translations, translate actions in the infinitive form. This is likely because it’s the lexical form in many languages.
However, take a tab called “Open”. Either it’s short for “Tiddlers that are currently open” (adjective) or “Open the Tiddlers” (imperative – telling the computer what to do) or “The Open ones” (substantive). Why would you translate it as “to open”? Context will tell which one of the three former options it is.
Note: As an aside, while we are talking about context in this specific example, I didn’t have much context while translating. This is because the language snippets are basically just a list of context-less phrases. So I had to guess which form a word should translate to.
“Open” is an example where I picked wrong. If it isn’t fixed by the time you see this, you will notice that I accidentally translated it as “Malfermu” (imperative) rather than “Malferma(j)” (adjective) or “Malfermo(j)” (substantive). But the one thing that it shouldn’t be corrected to is infinitive.
As a stylistic choice, I translated stand-alone nouns or noun phrases in the nominative e.g. “Informo” rather than “Informon”. I find it neater even though traditionally many stand-alone nouns are translated in the accusative.
To reconcile this idea, consider what the ending suggests about the elided part of the sentence. It’s not suggesting something wrong per se – just something different.
I have tried to keep proper nouns and acronyms the same. The same goes for tiddly-specific jargon like the word “tiddler”. As a general rule of thumb, if say, “tiddler”, is being used as a subject, it doesn’t get an ending and will be rendered as “tiddler”. If it is doing something else in the sentence, I will do something like this “tiddler-on” or “tiddler-ojn”.
One exception to not changing proper nouns was “Wiki”. Since it already has an Esperanto translation, “Wiki” becomes “Vikio” and “TiddlyWiki” becomes “TiddlyVikio” in the same way “Wikipedia” is “Vikipedio”.
At the end of the day though, I couldn’t help thinking with every decision that someone somewhere would be upset with me. Alas, “traduttore, traditore”.
Any, for now:
The generated Tiddler is here
And to see the project or to propose changes you need to go to the repo.
Warm regards.