[Enigmail] Will enigmail make use of Babelzilla?

[John Clizbe]

Jan Steffen wrote:
> Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> | Markur wrote:
> |> Will enigmail make use of Babelzilla ( http://www.babelzilla.org/ )
> |> for translating in future?
> |
> | Enigmail is concerned only with encrypting, decrypting, signing and
> | verifying emails.  Anything more than that is outside of our focus and
> | is unlikely to ever be done.
> 
> The question was about translating Enigmail, not new features. In fact
> Enigmail is already translated in many languages. Currently translation is
> done by editing the rdf directly. 
> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download/langpack.php#instruct
> It would sure be nice to have a more elegant translation tool.

IMO, More 'elegant' when speaking of machine translation does not necessarily
mean more correct.  This is especially true in translating technical language.
Most technical language is still in the linguistic realm of idiomatic speech and
this is the area where machine translation usually fails. Even the simple task
of English --> target language --> English often gives quite 'amusing' results
with technical terminology.

Having n people proofread and correct n machine translations is not going to be
that different in terms of overall effort from just having the people correctly
do the translating in the first place.

Don't misunderstand my stance, I'm all for something that eases language
translation, but any translator will have to prove it's up to the task before I
put any faith in its output.

-- 
John P. Clizbe                      Inet:   John (a) Mozilla-Enigmail.org
You can't spell fiasco without SCO. hkp://keyserver.gingerbear.net  or
     mailto:pgp-public-keys at gingerbear.net?subject=HELP

Q:"Just how do the residents of Haiku, Hawai'i hold conversations?"
A:"An odd melody / island voices on the winds / surplus of vowels"

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