[tldoc] Russian translation (texlive-ru)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2017-03-22 at 16:44:53 +0300, Nikola Lečić wrote:

 > On Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:18:52 +0100
 >   in <22736.25436.340513.139248 at zaphod.ms25.net>
 >   Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
 > 
 > > Hi,
 > > in texlive-ru, section 9 (Acknowledgements), various persons are
 > > mentioned by name.
 > > 
 > > It's a matter of fact that in western languages it's often nearly
 > > impossible to know how a particular character is pronounced.
 > > Cyrillic is obviously much less ambiguous in this respect.
 > 
 > Hi Reinhard,
 > 
 > Great!! Would you be so kind to check texlive-sr as well? I did my best
 > in understanding how to pronounce some names, but I am not sure I did
 > everything correctly.

Hi Никола,
please don't expect too much.  I'm not very familiar with all this
stuff.  I attended a Russian course at school about 40 years ago.  In
the meantime I had no opportunity to make use of what I've learned and
thus forgot almost everything.

I suppose that this is wrong:

  Russian: Дика Коча...

  Serbian: Дик Коч

Koch is definitely a German name and is pronounced "Кох".  But he's
living in the United States and I don't know how his name is
pronounced there.  I guess that Americans say "Кок".  I assume this
because Donald Knuth said that TeX should be pronounced "Тех" but
people who met him in person know that he pronounces it "Тек".

The name Павел Јаковски should be replaced with Павел Јацковски.  The
Russian translation looks correct.

There are obviously two possible ways to convert the name "Hàn Thế
Thành".

>From Wikipedia:

 | Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the
 | sounds of the original but rather with representing the characters,
 | ideally accurately and unambiguously.
 |
 | Conversely, transcription notes the sounds but not necessarily the
 | spelling.

If it's supposed to be a transliteration we should write "Хан Тхе Тхан"
(or maybe even "Хан Тхе Тханх") in both, Russian and Serbian; if it's
supposed to be a transcription we should write "Хан Те Тань" in Russian
and "Хан Те Тањ" in Serbian.

The first name of Michel Goossens sounds French and I suppose that the
proper transcription is Мишел.  The Russian translation is probably
wrong

  "Майкла Гусенса..."

and assumes English instead of French pronunciation (Michael or Mike
vs. Michel).  Michel is Belgian and I don't know how his last name is
pronounced but I suppose that Гусенс is more likely than Госенс.

I personally prefer transcriptions because they are more helpful than
transliterations here.  The TeX Live Guide is not a critical edition.

Translations cannot represent foreign names exactly because, for
instance, there is no letter "H" in the Cyrillic Alphabet.  Thus I
like very much that the Serbian translation mentions the native names
as well, like

  Петер Брајтенлонер [Peter Breitenlohner]

This is definitely a great idea.

Никола, a good opportunity to learn how Czech, Polish, Lithuanian,
Slovenian,... names are pronounced and to meet all these people in
person is to attend TUG-2017.  I'm looking forward to meet you
there. See

  http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/bachotex-promo

and, of course,

  http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2017-en/registration/registration-form

Regards,
  Reinhard

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