[IAEP] Eating "el elefante"

[Caryl Bigenho]

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.


Well, I finally started on the translation of a few "bites" of James Simmons' excellent FLOSS manual. "Make Your Own Sugar Activities." It is slow going, but if everyone who has a pretty good grasp of both English and Spanish helps out a little (or a lot), it can happen.


Here are a few things I have learned and some suggestions for making it easier... and a better translation. If you are a Mac user, as I am, you will possibly want to use your Firefox browser. Safari requires you to edit in html. Firefox will give you plain text. However, either will work fine. I have not tried it on a Windows machine, but Firefox is a safe bet.


You start by going to this site and Registering:  


http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ActivitiesGuideSugar_es/WebHome


Then when you are logged in, you can see what has been done so far (a little) and what needs to be worked on (a lot). You can also sign up to Monitor changes via email so you can see what others are working on.


To work, you will also want to open the English version of the book. You can find it at:


http://en.flossmanuals.net/ActivitiesGuideSugar/Introduction


James has already pasted a Babblefish translation into the Spanish version as a starting place. He chose it because Google Translate brought over the English too. It wasn't visible, but was there and caused problems. However, you may wish to use it on the side as well... I do.


Here's how I have been working:


I open 3 blank text files on my desktop, one for English, one for Bablefish, and one for Google Translate. I copy the Babblefish translation for the section into one file.  I copy the English from the English version into the second.  Then I paste the English version into Google translate and get its translation to paste into the third file.


You will be amazed and probably, as I was, dismayed!  There are huge discrepancies and lots of errors!  You will find incorrect uses of tense, "por y para", switching between Ud and tu in the same paragraph, completely incorrect words and the like.  Still it is a starting place and will save you a lot of typing.


I read a paragraph in the English version, think about how I would translate it, then check to see which of the 2 Spanish versions is closest to the meaning of the English version (sometimes they are way off base, almost comically so).  Then I cut and paste the best parts of the 2 together (usually into the Google version... for no special reason) and clean it up with corrections, deleting extra unneeded words (there will be quite a few) correcting tenses, and other grammatical errors. Then, if it sounds good when I read it aloud, I put it into the FLOSS Manual translation page.


Remember to log in to do this.  Check to be sure you have the correct place, select the old version, paste the corrected one in its place and click on  "Save".  If for some reason you enter the edit mode but want out... click on "Cancel." Don't worry if you make mistakes, someone will probably catch and fix them later.


Hopefully we will soon have some folks from Latin America going over these cleaned up translations and doing some final "polishing."


I look forward to seeing some of your names on the translations!


Caryl (aka Carolina)

 		 	   		  
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