[Pkg-samba-maint] r1480 - in trunk/samba/debian: . po

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 07:42:03AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Steve Langasek (vorlon at debian.org):
> > On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 06:37:02PM +0000, bubulle at alioth.debian.org wrote:
> > > Log:
> > > Remove Extra Capitalization As We Are Not Speaking German

> > No, we're speaking English, and as this is a /title/ rather than a sentence,
> > it's valid to capitalize each word.

> I do not agree that this is a title. I would call this a "prompt" or a
> "question". 

> In general, select/multiselect short descriptions are not treated as
> title in debconf templates and I think it should be made consistent
> with that.

So the point I made privately on IRC was that grammatically, this is not a
question in English (a question is a sentence, which this is not), and a
"prompt" is not a distinct grammatical construct in English; this is a
prompt, but grammatically it's still a title.

I've therefore reverted this particular change.  If there were a consensus
on the debian-l10n-english list that this is the correct capitalization and
the other is incorrect, I would be happy to discuss it; but by my native
reading, it's the original capitalization that's correct.

Anyway, this was the last issue that I considered outstanding for 3.0.25b-2,
so I'm going to prepare an upload of that now.  If there needs to be further
discussion of this point, it can happen asynchronously.

> > Further, several of the "unfuzzied" translations retain capitalizations that
> > are consistent with the way the title was being capitalized in English, and
> > not at all consistent with the new capitalization.

> I do not agree either..:). Choosing the Right Capitalization should be
> done by translators by following the typographical rules of their
> language, not by following those from English or theose used by
> maintainers. So, by definition, we should assume they are correct with
> regard to their rules, whatever change we make to templates with
> regards to typography.

> Whether they really do it or not is *their* problem..:-)

My point is that by unfuzzying the text, the translators are denied the
opportunity to review their translations for consistency, and I noticed that
for several languages where the capitalization rules for titles require
*not* capitalizing words other than the initial word, the translation did
capitalize each word.  So clearly the theory for capitalizing these words in
the translation must have been different, perhaps related to an
interpretation of the words as proper names; which means if they're not
being treated as proper names in English, these translations would warrant a
review.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/