Re: [g-a-devel]high gnopernicus string count

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Hi Luis,

> Hey, folks. The release team was alerted last week that gnopernicus
> contains nearly 1,000 strings- which by itself would increase the
> current GNOME core string count by around 8%, and is larger than
> everything else in the core except the applets, games, and file manager.
> This is a concern for the release team because of the stress it will put
> on our smaller translation teams.
> 
> I understand that gnopernicus covers a lot of ground and has a lot of
> unusual UI requirements, but this seems like a very large number, and
> it's a large additional burden on the translators. Is there the
> possibility that unnecessary or additional strings are being translated,
> or that there is some other way we can review the strings before the
> string freeze to make sure everything is as sane and correct as
> possible? While the release team can't do much directly, we would like
> to urge the a11y and i18n teams to work together here very shortly to
> help cut down on the number of strings if that's at all possible.
> 
> Anyway... hope this can start some dialogue here-

I haven't done an audit of the Gnopernicus strings - I'll leave that to the
experts at BAUM.  But... I do want to point out that the whole point of
Gnopernicus is to present in audio everything that you and I see on the
screen.  We don't need the word "menu" to know that a thing is a menu; it is
one because it looks like one and behaves like one.  Similarly, we don't
need the word "checked" to know that a checkbox is checked (or "visible", or
"focusable"), or that a word is in "italics"; we get that visually.

While there may be a number of strings that aren't needed (or which don't
need to be translated) - which we should find and note, to ease the burden
of localization of Gnopernicus and the GNOME desktop - Gnopernicus will by
its very nature have a high number of strings.  It is the nature of the
beast!


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team