Mastodawn

i have a question for speakers of different languages regarding how the software you are using expresses the concept of "an action is currently happening" (examples in english: "Downloading updates..." / "Saving report.doc, please wait...")

so far i see the following options, please correct me or provide with additional ones, or info on languages i have not mentioned

#german / #deutsch: passive voice with phrases such as "wird heruntergeladen" (is being downloaded)

#french / #français: nouns corresponding to verbs, such as "lecture" (reading), "téléchargement" (down-/uploading) and "enregistrement" (saving)

#russian / #русский: likewise verbal nouns, such as "чтение" (reading), "загрузка" (loading/uploading), "сохранение" (saving)

#italian / #italiano: verbal nouns ending in -aggio

#japanese / #日本語: verbs ending in 中

#l10n #i18n #translation

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Oliver Czulo 1d ago

@rnd I'd argue that the passive voice in German doesn't actually cover the processual aspect, but is used because so you avoid to have to chose between formal or informal address. If you want to highlight an ongoing process (which you don't need to do, grammatically spoken), you'd either add a small word such as "gerade" or you could use a form like "am/beim Herunterladen". The latter, however, is considered colloquial speech and varies regionally.

I see a further possible reason for ...

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Oliver Czulo 1d ago

@rnd ... the use of passive voice in German. English can have so-called unagentive nouns in subject position such as in "The file is downloading". A literal translation into German would read as though it was the file that is downloading something. When using the passive voice, you don't need to specify who or what is downloading something, but it is clearly not the file.

BTW, in case anyone ever wondered why you might need a trained translators for a good i18n and l10n, this is why :)

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/dev/urandom

@OliverCzulo yeah, it took me seeing a bunch of really bad software translations to realize how important good and consistent localization is

the purpose of this thread specifically is to collect data and determine how best to translate such phrases into #esperanto, because i likewise see several different options of varying quality (my preferred option so far is to follow the french/italian/russian format and use a verbal noun, especially since it's easy to come up with verbal nouns in esperanto, but i see the german-style passive voice form as valid, too)