en to fr without using accented characters

[BarryK]

Hi guys,
esmourguit very kindly did a lot of translating for EasyOS. I did send him a pm recently (2 July), but he hasn't yet read it, so I thought that I would ask about something here...

EasyOS uses reFind boot manager for UEFI booting, and Syslinux for old-BIOS booting, and esmourguit has provided /usr/share/sss/boot_strings/boot_strings.fr which, has this in it:

Code: Select all

[_syslinux.cfg]
#/syslinux.cfg
s%Normal startup%Lancement normal%
s%Filesystem check%Examen du système de fichiers%
s%Commandline only, do not start X%Ligne de commande uniquement, ne pas lancer X%
s%Rollback to last saved session%Retour vers l'ultime session enregistrée%
s%Rollback to pristine first bootup%Retour au premier lancement d'origine%

[_EFI_BOOT_refind.conf]
#/EFI/BOOT/refind.conf
s%normal bootup%Lancement normal%
s%Filesystem check%Examen du système de fichiers%
s%Commandline only, do not start X%Ligne de commande uniquement, ne pas lancer X%
s%Rollback to last saved session%Retour vers l'ultime session enregistrée%
s%Rollback to pristine first bootup%Retour au premier lancement d'origine%

reFind is not UTF-8 friendly, and displays the accented characters as two question-marks. So this:

Examen du système de fichiers

Displays as:

Examen du syst??me de fichiers

And this:

Retour vers l'ultime session enregistrée

Displays as:

Retour vers l'ultime session enregistr??e

Is it acceptable for the fr translation to be only ascii characters? Would this be not too insulting to the French person?:

Examen du systeme de fichiers
and:
Retour vers l'ultime session enregistree

[oui]

Hi Barry

I, it is my private decision, never use accents in system files or file names. In German it is easy and evident as there is an old definition out the time of old systems like telex etc. (ä=ae, ö=oe, ü=ue, ß=ss, all other accented char's in German are coming from foreing languages and did be forgot!). In French, I don't know such a "translation"'s code. I only know those of old HTML language (for ex. é=é but they are not useful in system level). That what works in system level is to commute the char map into US map international (us intl) immediately after start or us for Spanish peoples! All major signs for French are also available and this works in system level! You can use with «us intl» all signs of the most European languages and Chinese transliteration in ASCI correctly accentued named pinyin! The keyboard picture of us intl is to find in the text editor from http://inputking.com (the dictionaries from Seamonkey are good working in the editor! But no "save" function: You have to take your finish text with CTRL c or the mouse...

I suppose musher will also read and say his opinion as bi lingual specialist, he works to translates a lot as I know, He will probably also give his opinion.

Kind regards

[musher0]

Hello Barry, oui.

Thanks to oui for the kind invitation.

Not knowing reFIND, and not having a 64-bit PC ATM to try EASY-OS on, I will have
to decline suggesting a technical solution.

If non-accented French text appears ONLY in this reFIND configuration file, I suppose
French-speaking users would understand that it is a technical issue and not be insulted.
(I personally would not!)

An old way around it is to tweak the translation a bit to drop the accented words:

Examen des fichiers ( Examination of files )
and
Retour vers l'ultime session ( Return to last session )

The translation in this case is not faithful to the English original, but it is not giving false
information either, it is just being a bit more general. We used to do this back in the day.

Best regards.

[BarryK]

Thanks for the feedback.

I decided to change the accented characters to just plain "e". The problem is only at the very first boot menu, once the initrd is running, UTF-8 characters are able to display.

The next release of EasyOS will have nice GUI dialogs in the initrd, to choose keyboard layout and enter a password.

There will be en-, fr- and de-specific builds, both for usb img file and live-cd iso, so no need to install a langpack PET, it will already be translated right from the first bootup screen.

[oui]

Hi Barry

I would, if possible, propose a different approach: A field where it is possible to enter up to 10 chars for the keyboard definition used by setxkbmap (for ex. 2 chars for US or 6 chars for US INTL or 5 chars for CH FR)

this one, CH FR, is the demonstration of the division of the keyboard world (and it is perhaps the demonstration why als well SliTaz as NuTyz as well as BeatrixII, an other early competitor of Puppy, did be created: Swiss people was sad don't to find her (good! It is really good) keyboard layout in some Linux distros)! There is no real unified Frenche keyboard. On the French keyboard of France, all is different: The position of major chars of the alphabet as well as the control of numbers on top of the keyboard! Other French speaking countries did not accept that surprising layout and have her own layout: Quebec, Belgium, French parts of Swiss (French and German keyboard of Swiss are about the same: only 3 keys are different, no, not different, only inversed, German or French shiffted instead the other!)

The most standard keyboard layout over all is US INTL.

All from US keyboard is valid. The commutations with ALT GR, ALT and CTRL event. with SHIFT covers about all latin alphabets of all regions, including Chinese Piniyin, excepted really difficult ones (Vietnam f. ex.). And through INPUT KING in the browser, you can write the main Asian languages without to have to install something for some input method else (but fonts, Asian fonts are of course needing)! Over that, http://inputking.com shows how the keyboard layout works (select in inputking the option "European languages" and test it)! If US INTL would be the standard keyboard in Puppy and if http://inputking.com would be bookmarked in the Puppy help of the menu (and perhaps in the bookmarks of Seamonkey if some ~/.mozilla available by Puppy start), foreign Puppy users would have a long time less problem to use Puppy . But the fonts question is also important. In my opinion, Puppy have to contain one (1) font for Hindi, Chinese simplified, Japanese and Korean at starting point! Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew, etc. ARE NOT so legitimate as Puppy can only write from left to right and can be forgot)!

Kind regards

PS: I am sorry, I can't test you easyOS: it doen't start friendly on my powerful DELL laptop! But I use really daily your old wary64-6.9.9, one of the best 64 bit Linux distros, the best over all if you consider it's size (but i did never understand if there is some devx file for it. That is the limit. And the blog pages refering to it are today away).