Japanese translation

[ickoonite]

I posted this in the long beta thread a little while back and think it may have been overlooked...

I've got a pretty complete (within the limits of the current English Localisation.plist) Japanese translation here, started after the inclusion of a Japanese translation in SVN which seemed, in my opinion, to be going in a slightly odd direction. I had to start from scratch as Xcode didn't seem to like the encoding of the current one.

Anyway, I'm sure this translation isn't perfect, but, well, I'm just trying to help out. Comments/corrections/etc. welcome.

http://giantblt.co.uk/res/Localizable.strings (set the encoding to Unicode in Safari and the file comes up fine)

A screenshot, for those interested - note the menus up top:

[evands]

Fantastic!

Daisuke, who is in charge of the Japanese translation, has been busy, and obviously you've outpaced him. I'd appreciate if you would drop him a line (dokada at mac dot com) as a courtesy and let him know you're helping out. I'd like to subscribe you to the translators list, as well. It's fairly low traffic in general. I think a reasonable strategy is allowing two official translators per language... I think more than that will get unmanageable fairly quickly.

In any case, I don't speak Japanese even a bit, so while I trust your credentials I'm hesitant to commit a new strings file right off the bat which starts from scratch -- I'm sure you understand. I'd like to get a discussion going on the translators list regarding it as well as the 'slightly odd direction' the current-SVN translation is headed.

Please email at evan@adiumx.com with the email address for the translators list. Thanks

[ickoonite]

E-mails sent.

And I totally understand your stance on putting a new strings file just like that. Who knows what slights against your good name I may have put in there!

[dokada]

ickoonite,

Thanks for your effort. I appreciate the help since I have been completely swamped with life at this moment.

I will be in my office able to sit down and see the .loc file you have generated in a couple of hours. Meanwhile I am just curious as to what you mean by "a slightly odd direction." There are several keys I have translated not literally for different reasons that have come up from the users of different IM clients, such as Proteus and Fire. There really is no universal language in Japanese IM softwares (including AIM, iChat, MSN, and Yahoo) and when you try to appeal to all of these users at once, the choice of words needs to be careful so that no confusion occurs as people switch to Adium the best of all IM softwares.

All of this to say that my localization is NOT perfect and I was just doing an initial leg work so that when I would have time in a near future I can get back and think through the consistencies and understandability. So when I saw your screen shot this morning, I was a bit shocked but was glad that someone took time to furnish what I did not have time to do at the moment. Now we can fine tune it and see how the Duck will take over the land of rising Sun 8)

I will email you, or AIM me at nickizukki

Thanks again

[ickoonite]

Hello.

Next time I post I shall be more careful about my choice of words. "Slightly odd direction" was perhaps a little harsher than I had intended. In any case, I should explain myself...

The bone of contention was "tomodachi" for "Contact". I note that Yahoo! Messenger uses tomodachi; dachi in hiragana, but cannot for the life of me get AIM to download, so I am not sure what AOL's take on it is. Being primarily an MSN user, I favoured kontakuto, as is evident from the screenshot. To me, it seemed obvious - Adium uses Contact, so why not do likewise? To my mind, tomodachi (or, God forbid, tomodachi with dachi in hiragana) is too...friendly? But, then again, I hate English AIM's insistence on the term "Buddies". I should point out here that I am British and (thus?) sometimes, when it comes to language, incredibly anal about the silliest little things.

I suppose it really depends which audience Adium is intended for. Microsoft is very corporate (even if, certainly in Britain, it probably has very few users over, say, 30). Anyway, for Microosft, "contact" comes naturally and, I suppose, kontakuto from that. AIM and Yahoo! are, I would think, more deliberately oriented towards being "cool?" in the eyes of teens and such, hence the respective Buddies and Friends.

A self-confessed computerphobe friend (Osaka-shusshin ) of mine had a look over my translation and pointed out that she didn't actually know what kontakuto meant. As a student of the language and something of a kanji purist, I hate katakana more than most Japanese people, but, save for aite, we were hard-pressed to come up with something better. Besides, we are talking about translating for a platform which prefers purinto over insatsu, which personally makes my skin crawl.

So there you go. That's my reasoning for kontakuto and not liking tomodachi, but then most of it comes down to my own personal bias rather than any fault on your part.

Oh, and I've since found some mistakes in the version linked to in the previous post, so I've reuploaded the strings file - http://giantblt.co.uk/res/Localizable.strings.

(Hmmm...phpBB doesn't like Japanese. What on earth do we have Unicode for!?)

[Son of a Preacher Man]

I hate English AIM's insistence on the term "Buddies". I should point out here that I am British and (thus?) sometimes, when it comes to language, incredibly anal about the silliest little things.

I hear that. Agreed on both counts!

Not wanting to distract from important business here, but - the mods want to keep this board "family-friendly", I hear, so refraining from expletives would be appreciated

[dokada]

Not wanting to distract from important business here, but - the mods want to keep this board "family-friendly", I hear, so refraining from expletives would be appreciated

Sorry for being a bit exclusive in content. Not meaning to do that. Hopefully we have enough Japanese Fluent users on this forum to contribute to what we are discussing here. But even if you are not, your imput is appreciated

The bone of contention was "tomodachi" for "Contact". I note that Yahoo! Messenger uses tomodachi; dachi in hiragana, but cannot for the life of me get AIM to download, so I am not sure what AOL's take on it is. Being primarily an MSN user, I favoured kontakuto, as is evident from the screenshot. To me, it seemed obvious - Adium uses Contact, so why not do likewise? To my mind, tomodachi (or, God forbid, tomodachi with dachi in hiragana) is too...friendly? But, then again, I hate English AIM's insistence on the term "Buddies". I should point out here that I am British and (thus?) sometimes, when it comes to language, incredibly anal about the silliest little things.

I did a quick search on the term "contact" checking on the 4 Official Clients. Here are the results.
- MSN = "menba" without "-" at the end
- Yahoo = "tomodachi"
- AIM = "tomodachi"
- iChat = "menba-"

I agree with you, ickoonite on the word choice about "contact." I love to use "contakuto" as the choice of words for Adium. In fact I went back and forth about it even to this day (resulting in some left out localization key on the Japanese.lproj with this word. In Adium, not all the key that uses the word "Contact" refers to people you have in your "contact list" (or your "friend" = "tomodachi") so I still prefer using "contact" in these cases. However, as your friend expressed to you, "contakuto" is not a familiar term for most of the Japanse users. That creates an initial confusion that I thought we do not need to create. Thus I chose "tomodachi" for now.

As for the use of Kanji only, I have a bit different perspective on that being a native Japanese speaker. Japanse as a whole use a lot of katakana by transliterating the imported words. The reason people use "Purinto" instead of "Insatsu" for the word "Print" is simply the matter of "looking good" and "sounding good." So while there are places for the Kanji, there also are places for Katakanas.

I have not had chance to look at your file. I clicked on the link above but some of the translations were unreadable for me.

Perhaps, we should just chat or mail each other instead of hogging the Forum with issues that are concern for possibly two of us
[/list]

[evands]

If the forum is convenient, feel free to continue -- it's not like what goes on in one thread interferes with any other, and I'm sure I'm not the only one enjoying this discussion even without knowing the Japanese behind it.

If I can merge the two existing files in a sane way (say, keeping all keys in the current one but adding all newly translated keys in the new one), would that be a good thing? Or would that just create more work?

[zaudragon]

I posted this in the long beta thread a little while back and think it may have been overlooked...

Well, I've been offering for a long time but I guess I'm not good enough

Well, I am not good enough since I only have a 6th grade Japanese education!

[evands]

I posted this in the long beta thread a little while back and think it may have been overlooked...

Well, I've been offering for a long time but I guess I'm not good enough

Well, I am not good enough since I only have a 6th grade Japanese education!

We love you though!

[zaudragon]

I posted this in the long beta thread a little while back and think it may have been overlooked...

Well, I've been offering for a long time but I guess I'm not good enough

Well, I am not good enough since I only have a 6th grade Japanese education!

We love you though!

Thanks! Japanese is my first language but ickoonite is probably better than me

[dokada]

If I can merge the two existing files in a sane way (say, keeping all keys in the current one but adding all newly translated keys in the new one), would that be a good thing? Or would that just create more work?

This would be helpful if you could do that. I know ickoonite has done so much and hate to see the effort from both of us not reflecting in the localization. If there is a easy way to compare the two, that would be great.

I am sure that there are several languages in the future that have similar conflict due to having different people working on a localization, so if you could figure it out, you will become the savior of the localizers 8)

Well, I am not good enough since I only have a 6th grade Japanese education!

I say 6th grade Japanese level would be sufficient to contribute to the invasion of Japan by the Adium ducks

[ickoonite]

Time differences are starting to come into play - I have been asleep - and I awake to see that much has happened! I'm away for a few days now for Easter holidays, but should be checking this board and e-mail every now and then for updates, etc.

to evan:
Hope you'll see this - if you can merge the files, brilliant. The issue is likely to be one of encoding - my file was made in Xcode - whereas Daisuke's was, I assume, in the Localizer programme, hence the encoding differences (and probably lots of other horrible issues).

to dokada:
The linked to strings file is a bit dodgy - if you manually set Safari's encoding to Unicode, it should be possible to view everything in there.

It was made in Xcode, rather than this Localizer programme, which is why there may be problems with it. I was planning on doing diffs of the English strings file as it gets updated to see what I have to add to it, but Localizer is doubtless the saner option.

I am now trying to work out why I believed MSN to use kontakuto, because that was my basis for using it in the first place - I thought that if at least one IM client used it, then I wasn't being too radical. Alas it appears I am, so I am now rather inclined to more favour "menba/menba-" as a neutral term which doesn't bring too much "friendliness" to it.

And I know precisely what you mean about the "purinto/insatsu" thing, and realise that the Mac does this rather a lot - the fomatto menyu is a good example - borudo, itarikku, andarain, kara, etc. So then in a way, I don't feel too guilty about kontakuto, because my same friend pointed out that kasen would be better for "underline".

So I don't know. I will obviously defer to you as the native speaker on this - it's your call! :twisted:

to zaudragon:

Well, I am not good enough since I only have a 6th grade Japanese education!

I'm not sure what 6th grade is, but I'm sure it's more than enough. I don't claim to be perfect, by any means, and I am sure there are bits where you will look at what I have written and go "Argh!"

[dokada]

Good Morning

Indeed we were working hard while you were asleep Now I am heading into the evening hour. It still amazes me to know that I can communicate with people all over the world so easily... well, I am an old guy, ok...

So I don't know. I will obviously defer to you as the native speaker on this - it's your call!

Just in case, I want to clarify. I do not mean that just because I am a national, I have the right to dictate the decisions on localization. In the past, I did a few localization works (just to get my feet wet) and what I got was responses from the users demanding the localization to be the same as other apps (especially Apple brand apps) as much as possible. I do agree with you that "kasen" is better than "underline" (I think we are on a similar page on this) but we must decide whether to go with the flow or go with the flow or even create the flow. For the word "contact" I have been considering creating the flow rather than using the "member" just because it sounds good to me (and to you)

I will get the file worked out and see what we can do from there. O... If I haven't said this yet, it is nice to have a partner in this. There are so many strings to translate and my plate has been full of late. I sure do appreciate your effort.

Have a good vacation.[/quote]

[evands]

I can't come up with a good or even halfway good way to merge them... Sorry

[carlj7]

Man, I'd like to see 連絡者 for buddy, but maybe that's just because I'm hearing too many school announcements these days. Also, I agree that Apple goes waaay overboard on katakana-izing. I mean, ライブラリー I can almost buy, since there is no tiny 館 in my computer that houses 図書, but ミュージック? Namida Buddha preserve us, that's just バカ. My 音 is 楽しい dammit!

Anyhow, I've hacked my /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemFolderLocalizations/ja.lproj/SystemFolderLocalizations.strings
to fix that.

Incidentally, to post Japanese text in phpBB, just use Mozilla/Firefox/Camino.

[ickoonite]

I can't come up with a good or even halfway good way to merge them... Sorry

Yeah, about that - what is this loc file that I need for localising? I can't find it anywhere in the source tree. Am I being incredibly stupid?

As I mentioned before, I made my localisation by just directly editing the strings file in Xcode, but this Localizer seems much better for an oft-changing set of strings.

If necessary, I can start from scratch.

[evands]

I can't come up with a good or even halfway good way to merge them... Sorry

Yeah, about that - what is this loc file that I need for localising? I can't find it anywhere in the source tree. Am I being incredibly stupid?

As I mentioned before, I made my localisation by just directly editing the strings file in Xcode, but this Localizer seems much better for an oft-changing set of strings.

If necessary, I can start from scratch.

Generated with the Localization Manager program... the version we're using is in private beta, I'll email you a link to it. You don't need to create a .loc file, though... your localizable.strings file works just fine. I just need to know which file should be in svn.. the 'complete' one with some debated strings, or the incomplete one Daisuke did.

Localization Manager can easily import your strings file -- the .loc file is just what's given to the Localizer program used by a translator, and basically just has the contents of the Localizable.strings along with information about which keys have changed, which ones aren't yet translated, etc.

[ickoonite]

Anyhow, I've hacked my /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemFolderLocalizations/ja.lproj/SystemFolderLocalizations.strings
to fix that.

Cheers for that! I've been wondering for ages how to get Downloads to show as, well, ダウンロード, or, for purists, 受信した書類等. And now I can!

[ickoonite]

I just need to know which file should be in svn.. the 'complete' one with some debated strings, or the incomplete one Daisuke did.

I'll defer to Daisuke on this one. Just to let you know, I have made a few more minor modifications to the file - corrections - so if you are going to put my one into the tree, best to download it again.

http://giantblt.co.uk/res/Localizable.strings