Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

Even so, it's worth some effort to reduce the number of strings marked
for translation, especially when those strings aren't user-visible.

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:00, Danilo Segan wrote:
> Luis Villa <louie ximian com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 11:45, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >> > 2-Reduce the pos to only UI visable strings, no normal user will take a
> >> > look at Debug strings and so speak with coders about which strings to
> >> > include on the pos and which not...
> >> 
> >> Possibly controversial, but not something I'll get into. ;-)
> >
> > FWIW, I don't think this should be controversial at all. Coders who
> > don't know English are already in a deep hole, and debug string in a
> > foreign language reported to english-speaking hackers or (worse) into
> > bugzilla are of virtually no use. If it goes to console, it should never
> > be marked for translation (IMHO.)
> 
> This is too simple-minded, IMHO.  I consider myself a technical
> person, and yet I prefer to see every output in my own language.  I
> even have the habbit of naming variables, functions and such in my
> own language, write comments in my own language etc.
> 
> Being a GNOME developer (I'm not one -- at this time ;) means
> accepting a *policy* of English being the default: not every coder
> actually prefers it for writing code. There are obvious advantages of
> using English (easier to share), but it has nothing to do with debug
> strings being translatable: if one can read/write code, and gets a
> debug message she understands, she might help sooner rather than if
> she gets a message she doesn't grasp because it's in English.
> 
> Good examples are the recently removed gcalctool messages. One of the
> messages was of the form "Error: Newton's iteration doesn't
> converge" (or something similar).  This is a place where a
> mathematican might help if she understands where the problem is.  Any
> programming voodoo is usually withing grasp of many mathematicians,
> and being able to understand the message, no matter how "debuggy" it
> is, might prove invaluable.
> 
> Of course, this is purely imaginary, and probably quite rare case, so
> it all reduces to "My *preference* is to have debug messages
> translated."  This needs to be weighted against "no unneccessary
> workload for translators".
> 
> (FWIW, in the Linux kernel 2.2 era, I've even translated some of the
> printk messages just for fun -- I believe I even saw a project to do
> that systematically not long ago; though, from the desktop stance,
> kernel is a technology and the way of its operation is not really
> relevant -- my main point while doing that was: when something screws
> up badly, that's when you most need to understand what has happened)
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Danilo
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