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French translation

Discussions about the documentation, main Rainmeter site and forums.
Die-and-Love-me
Posts: 1
Joined: March 8th, 2020, 2:53 pm

French translation

Post by Die-and-Love-me »

Good afternoon,

I am French and new here.
I discovered Rainmeter a few days ago and I am impressed by its possibilities.
However, the documentation is only accessible to English speakers. So, I was wondering if you would be interested by a French translation.
You will find, attached, the preamble translated.
Traduction française Manuel Rainmeter.pdf
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jsmorley
Developer
Posts: 22628
Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: French translation

Post by jsmorley »

Die-and-Love-me wrote: March 8th, 2020, 3:05 pm Good afternoon,

I am French and new here.
I discovered Rainmeter a few days ago and I am impressed by its possibilities.
However, the documentation is only accessible to English speakers. So, I was wondering if you would be interested by a French translation.
You will find, attached, the preamble translated.

Traduction française Manuel Rainmeter.pdf
Appreciate the effort, but no. We are just not going to translate a very technical manual into different languages.

Here is a response I gave to an earlier question about this subject:


LittleSuXing wrote:Can we translate the documentation of Rainmeter to Chinese ?
No, sorry.

Aside from the fact that it would be very difficult to get an accurate translation for what is a technical manual, with options and values that must not be translated, creating a useful translation of even the explanations would require both an expert fluency in Chinese and an extensive understanding of every option and behavior in Rainmeter.

I shudder to think how even the most native Chinese speaker with an advanced mathematics degree and a couple of years experience with Rainmeter would attempt to translate Transformation Matrix Guide.

In addition, the manual is very dynamic and changes quite often. It would be an impossibly hard and ongoing task to maintain any translations.

This is not something we intend to attempt, nor would we support anyone else doing so, unless it was purely for their own use, in which case we would wish them 好运.



In addition to the complexity of doing it to begin with, and the ongoing and never-ending requirement to keep it current, it is also true that while the manual might well be translated, the manual is only half the equation. The other half is being able to come here to the forums, and ask for help with some issue you are having or some clever approach you want to explore. We simply can't and won't try to support different languages here on the forums, as we don't want people off in their own distinct silos based on language. Any question and answer here needs to at least have the possibility of helping everyone, not just Chinese (or French) speaking users. In addition, when someone references the manual in a question or an answer here, it needs to be a single, accurate, unambiguous reference. We take great care in what we say in the manual, and for the most part, every word is important.

So as I said to the user asking about Chinese, no, but bonne chance...
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eclectic-tech
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Joined: April 12th, 2012, 9:40 pm
Location: Cedar Point, Ohio, USA

Re: French translation

Post by eclectic-tech »

Is poorly translated French any better than English?
translatemanual.png
(Using 'To Google Translate' Extension for FireFox to translate pages in the browser)
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jsmorley
Developer
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Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: French translation

Post by jsmorley »

eclectic-tech wrote: March 10th, 2020, 12:41 am Is poorly translated French any better than English?
translatemanual.png (Using 'To Google Translate' Extension for FireFox to translate pages in the browser)
While I'm in general a fan of Google Translate, I think it is spectacularly bad for this. The reason is that while the "explanations" of the options can be in a different language, the option "names" and in many cases the option "values" must not be translated, or it will just cause extreme confusion. Google just can't reliably tell the difference.
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eclectic-tech
Rainmeter Sage
Posts: 5384
Joined: April 12th, 2012, 9:40 pm
Location: Cedar Point, Ohio, USA

Re: French translation

Post by eclectic-tech »

Yes, that does make using this approach unappealing... :Whistle
Shangraila
Posts: 1
Joined: March 20th, 2020, 9:48 pm

Re: French translation

Post by Shangraila »

Are user based translation just not a thing anyone wants to implement ?
I've seen other programs do it through a community effort and Google Docs.