[od-discuss] re: Open Definition Telecon 15:00 UTC Thursday, 2014-04-10

Sat Apr 5 17:23:02 UTC 2014

In the announcement of
Open Definition Telecon 15:00 UTC Thursday
2014-04-10

I saw

>Discussion of Japanese translation suggestions submitted by ishikawa
>  (https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2014-March/000810.html)

I reported the couple of issues with the Japanese version of Open
Definition. It has been a while since I posted this, and so I was
wondering how we can handle the issues.

Thank you for following up on the topics in the conference.

As a matter of fact, when I read the Japanese translation, I can go on
and find a few more translation issues.  For starters, I quote a
couple of more improvements to the Japanese translation at the end of
this e-mail.

However, the priority of the first two issues which I posted a few
weeks ago is much, much higher. The somewhat unclear Japanese
translation resulted in a few misunderstandings already, and when I
referred the confused parties to the original English version, the
reaction was "Oh, I see." inevitably.

So it would be desirable to get the discussion going on the previous
two issues IMHO.

It is unfortunate the original translators, or whoever are responsible
for the inclusion of the Japanese translation in the open definition
web site do not seem to read this discussion mailing list very often,
or may not have the time to respond in a timely manner (it does not
help that March is the end of fiscal year in many Japanese
organizations including all government offices, almost all the schools,
and many private companies, and the beginning of April is often the time
for the announcement of promotion, relocation, etc. from human resources
departments in Japan. So people are usually pretty busy this time of the
year in Japan.)

I wonder how we can maintain the quality of Japanese translation (and
for that matter, we have the issue of ensuring the quality of
translations in many languages other than Japanese, too.)

Anyway, people's feedback would be appreciated on the issues I am
bringing up. The definition is already read by many Japanese people
and any slight confusion or misunderstanding should be avoided from
the early stage if possible.

I would like to help, but not sure how.

TIA

Below is two more translation issues I noticed after a quick re-reading.

[1] 2. Redistribution Clause

Original English version Quote:
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away
the work either on its own or as part of a package made from works
from many different sources. The license shall not require a royalty
or other fee for such sale or distribution.

Issue: (minor)
Strictly speaking, the phrase "from many different sources" in the
first sentence is missing in the Japanese translation.

My suggested modification: this may not be urgent, but we can add 「出
所の」 which has the meaning of source(s).  There is an alternate word
"ソース" (which is basically created based on the English world
"source"). So it may be appropriate here. But I don't like to use it
here because "ソース" is often used refer to "source" code of
computer software. I want avoid the confusion.

ライセンスは、作品自身あるいは様々な*出所の＊作品を集めたパッケージの一
部として
販売したり無償で頒布したりすることを制限してはいけません。

[2] 3. Reuse Clause

There is a comment sentence. So, this is not in a, er, normative
part of the definition. It is a comment and in that sense,
second-class compared to the normative part.
Still, it should be translated crystal clear.

Original English Quote:

Comment: Note that this clause does not prevent the use of ‘viral’
or share-alike licenses that require redistribution of modifications
under the same terms as the original.

Issue: (unclear Japanese)
This sentence is not quite well translated.
The handling of the subjective phrase "'viral" or share-alike
licenses ..." is not quite well done.
I am afraid that whoever translated the English version into Japanese
were not quite familiar with 'viral' licenses such as GNU's GPL.
(Or maybe the translator got confused with the "or" in the expression
"or share-alike".
As far as the English sentences are concerned, I am assuming that it
is assumed that 'viral" and "share-alike" licenses are very similar in
principle to the point that they are connected by "or" in the
sentence. That is, it is assumed that we can call the licenses
discussed here as either "viral" or "share-alike" more or less.  Of
course GNU's GPL comes to mind naturally, but there must be a reason
that no mention of it is made here.)

The current Japanese sentence does not handle this sentence very well
at all and is a little confusing, and I am not sure if it is
grammatically correct at all.

Also, "redistribution" in the sentence is translated as
"sharing" (共有）. Yes, the spirit is the same, but since the clause is
titled　"Reuse", I think keeping the meaning of "redistribution" (再配
布）intact would　be preferable here.

My suggested modification:  （I added 「あるいは言い変えると」 which is
roughly translated "or, in other words", and clarified the phrase to
explain the action necessary for share-alike licenses.)

注釈:この条項は、修正した作品について元のライセンスと同じ条件での頒布を
要求する‘伝染’するライセンス、あるいは言い変えると、元の作品と同じ条
件のもとでの再配布を必要とするライセンスの利用を禁止するものではありま
せん。

（Translating back to English roughly:

Comment: Note that this clause does not prevent the use of ‘viral’
or, *in other words*, share-alike licenses that require redistribution
of modifications under the same terms as the original.

(CI comment: this is after all the part of "COMMENT", and so the
priority of fixing this is lower than the two previous issues I reported
a few weeks ago.)

[end of memo]