Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Christian Rose">

> So, in my opinion the biggest problem for GNOME translation is, as also
> other people have pointed out already, our marketing w.r.t.
> internationalization and language support.\

> nevertheless I suspect the gnome.org translation pages are too static and
> give too little help to attract the translation community en large.  We
> need help here to start making these pages incrementally better real soon.
> You don't even need to be a translator!

I've been chatting with Kenneth about this off-list, particularly about
'Translation Project' style web interfaces - it seems a lot of translators
do their work on Windows, aren't adept with traditional editing tools on
Linux, and so on. We have to help them.

> Last but not least, I think the general translation status in GNOME 2.4
> was very much influenced by the decision to include so many new, huge, and
> untested modules so late in the process. There were huge amounts of new
> messages as a result of this, many of them not even proofread or
> spellchecked as it seemed, and lots of other more or less i18n-related
> problems coming from previously not enough tested software, and more
> importantly too little time for fixing all of this.

One thing I mentioned to Kenneth was that we (the release team, and really
most of the developers) have *very little* visibility of i18n and l10n
problems. In the past, I have thought about this as a lack of distinction
between the i18n team and the translators. I don't want to sound like I'm
blaming you guys, but the 2.3 schedule [1] was very well known for a long
time, and the modules discussion was controversial enough that it was a hot
topic for weeks, if not months. Module and feature freeze was June 9, and
the final release was September 10.

So we need more feedback. We need it at module selection time, we need it as
we're going to release, etc.

Kenneth suggested that we have devel translation status information in the
tarballs due and release announcements. I reckon that if we can do that, we
should also have a new section in the weekly summary for a stable release
summary. These are low-hanging fruit fixes. :-)

> Looking at this from a GNOME 2.5/2.6 perspective, and looking at the
> "proposed" section of http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/modules/, I think
> there is unfortunately a danger of this piece of history repeating itself,
> perhaps even more than before. There are modules like dasher that are not
> even in GNOME cvs yet, and which GNOME translators have had little chance
> to work on and little possibility to try to find the problems in time.
> 
> Also, there is Evolution which is an *enormous* load of messages (over
> 6000 in the 1.4 branch!), and where translators have not even recieved a
> single response from the maintainers yet about which branch should really
> be worked on. As there seems to still be made releases from the 1.4
> branch, this question is not as simple as it may seem.

It's the 1.5 branch, so I'm assuming HEAD (I would have thought the modules
list would be correct).

Feedback like the above is *absolutely critical* when it comes to module
selection. If you guys didn't know which branch, fire off a mail to d-d-l
where everyone can see it and get an answer.

[ I'm right in the middle of writing a mail about the modules thing, so now
I'm having to go back and revise some of this stuff... ;-) ]

> I very much think that it's unfortunately too premature to include
> Evolution already in GNOME 2.6. I'm sorry to say this, and I know there
> have been tragic things happening to the Ximian developers, but looking at
> it from a practical side of things from a translation point of view I
> think we should better wait with Evolution for a later release.

There was always the possibility of accepting evolution-data-server and not
accepting Evolution, too. But your input on this is very important, and the
Evo dudes will have to answer to it. :-)

Thanks,

- Jeff

-- 
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