When an AMOS translator encounters an English short sentence or single word English language string, that can be either a verb or a noun (or otherwise have two differnet meanings), I think the translator can:
- Try to find the context of the string. This is great, but not always possibly / easy.
- Send a message/Email to Helen Foster, She has been extremely helpful, kind and quick to reply.
- Submit the string to the en_fixes language pack and state the problem and possibly suggest an alternative unequivocal wording (or the two possible interpretations), to be corroborated/corrected by Helen upon advisement from the developer who wrote the string. This, I think, is one of the reasons for having this special en_fixes language pack and has contributed to improve Moodle for all languages.
- Or, as the Moodle documentation currently states "If you think the original English language strings have more than one
meaning and you can't guess which one applies, you are welcome to post
in the AMOS translation forum" (this forum)
But, as a translator myself, I sometimes wonder if my failure to guess the one right meaning could merely be my ancient, scarce and biased knowledge of English grammar and my lack of confidence; and I might decide to randomly choose one meaning and translate it accordingly, instead of risking exposing myself as a non-professional translator. We, humans, all may make mistakes; and I have received a few AMOS contributions by my fellow contrymen asking me to fix my wrong choice .
This has happened to me a few times and I wonder which should be the best method to deal with these difficult strings which could have two or more different meanings.
I think this could be an interesting subject to discuss among Moodle translators.