Adding the norwegian mailinglist to the conversation.
On Wednesday 11 September 2024 08:40, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
Comparing the da.po and nb.po files (because they are sister languages) for nano, I noticed some differences. Where in Danish the English tag "Case Sens" is translated as "VersalFøls", the translation for Bokmaal is "Følsomt for store/små bokstavar".
I have been translating for about 28 years at this point, and I have never heard of the word «versal» before, let alone «versalfølsomhet». So I had to check a dictionary to verify that it existed in norwegian. Not only does it exist, it even has a danish and norwegian wikipedia entry. :-)
I found an discussion on the old mailinglist from 2001 https://i18n-no.lister.ping.uio.narkive.com/1ERPKjY3/case-sensitive-pa-norsk
In short, in norwegian the correct translation for «case sensitive» is the long string «skill mellom små og store bokstaver». I'll mark the entry as fuzzy for the time being.
But this string is far too long to fit in the available space.
If there is a space restriction, I depend on there being a notice by the developer which shows up in the various po editors. If there is no such notice, I assume there is no restriction. In this specific case, there is no notice.
Here's what the two bottom lines in nano look like on an 80-column terminal after typing ^W:
^G Hjelp M-C Følsomt for M-B Bakover ^P Eldre ^T Gå til linje ^C Avbryt M-R Reg.exp. ^R Erstatt ^N Nyere
See that after M-C it says "Følsomt for ", meaning that one of the two main concepts (case) of the tag is lost. :/
Would it work in Bokmaal to use "Versalfølsomt"?
Maybe. I am unsure if anyone actually would understand what it means. When someone like me who often look in programming code and scripts who needs to be carefull of Case SenSiTiviTy have never heard of this word, what are the chances of someone else who don't care one bit about Case Sensitivity know what this means?
(That would still get clipped to "M-C Versalfølsom", but a missing "t" would not hurt understanding, I think?
Yes, that single missing character isn't important when reading the word.
Further I noticed these:
msgid "Display the position of the cursor" msgstr "Vis pekerposisjon"
msgid "Constantly show cursor position" msgstr "Vis alltid markørposisjonen"
msgid "Constant cursor position display" msgstr "Lås markørposisjon"
The last translation does not look right? The cursor position does not get locked, but constantly advertised as line, column, and character position.
Good catch. Seems to be from the previous translator, way back.
I also noticed that sometimes you translate "cursor" as "peker" and at other times as "markør".
Those two words are interchangeable. They mean the same.
It would probably be better to consistently use "peker", also to avoid possible confusion with "merke" and "marker" (for the English "mark" and "to mark").
In norwegian there is no confusion of the two words.