Dmitry Timoshkov wrote:
In general it's important IMHO to keep translated text match its english version as much as possible. One of the reasons is to avoid other translators from fixing the mismatches, another is to really keep the UI consistent in different languages.
The thing that makes these translations difficult is that this is not so easy when translating Russian into English. A sentence like: "Выберите принтер" could be "Choose your printer" or "Choose a printer" in English, depending on the context. This is partially a peculiarity of English (and other Western-European languages) and partially because in Russian people tend to use possessive pronouns less in general.
If you would always try to keep exact translations, it would mean that software which is originally Russian would likely have different texts than software which is originally in English and then translated to Russian. I think Nikolay's idea is to avoid this difference.
The other way around, you can translate "мне нравится" to English every time as "for me it is nice" or "by me it is liked", but English speakers would only consider "I like" a proper translation.
I also understand the reasons why one would still try to maintain the original as much as possible however, so I would try to find a common guideline on how to deal with this for the Russian translation (or for all Slavic translations).
Best regards, Julius