Re: major libgweather Locations updates

["Djihed Afifi" <djihedlists googlemail com>]

Hi,


I followed the thread.

This update is a lot of stuff. And it seems that it's still changing constantly.

First, are you absolutely sure this is stable now? I won't touch this
until it is.

I personally can't help but think it isn't. I am not sure what
methodology was used to prune or consider cities.

I had a quick look at Arab cities in general and Algerian cities in particular.

Algeria has 48 "wilayas" (districts), but there are only 34 cities in
the file. Some of them are not the district "capitals". Many will miss
them, because in general you would be looking for "New York", not some
obscure suburb around it.

Algeria also has a very odd population density. 80% of people live in
15% of the land. But more than half the cities in the file are Saharan
cities.

The city choice was not made on population either. Some of the major
cities are not present. And there are still cities that are based on
airport names. "Dar el Beida" is a suburb of Algiers, so is "El
Golea". Both are present because of airports there.

The choice was also not made based on distinct cities in their X km^2
geographical areas.

What I gather from this is that:
* the choice was not made on district capitals.
* It was not made based on population count.
* It was not made based on density.
* It was not made based on geographical areas.

In brief, some Algerian choosing cities, and looking under Algeria
will be wondering how exactly were the cities chosen. I suspect the
same will be true for many people around the world.

I am not sure what the methodology is. If you would like it to fix
this, then please fix this at once. I  personally don't mind going to
fix stuff in my country. What about the dozens of other countries we
will be translating?

Please consider pondering about it a bit more, and make it stable with
sound decisions before making each translation team spend 20 hours on
this.

Thanks.
Djihed




On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:24 AM, Dan Winship <danw gnome org> wrote:
> I've just committed a huge update to libgweather's Locations.xml.in.
> From an i18n perspective, the big changes are that a lot of strings
> representing airport names, etc, went away and were replaced with actual
> city names. Also, many city names in some countries were replaced with
> better-localized/better-transliterated versions.
>
> This is unfortunately a huge amount of churn in an already-huge list of
> translatable strings. Two suggestions:
>
>    1) Search the po file comments for "This is the capital of", which
>       will let you find national capitals, which are presumably more
>       likely than average to need special translations. Also, search
>       for "is the traditional English name" to find cities that are
>       called something different in English than they are in the
>       local language, which usually also points to the need for a
>       translation.
>
>    2) Other than that, wait a week or so (or more) before translating
>       anything, and don't clean out the now-unused translations right
>       away, because we'll be requesting some help from gnome-love
>       which may result in some lame cities being removed and other ones
>       being renamed, etc. Also, once GNOME 2.23.6 is out there, we're
>       going to bump the intltool requirement to the latest version,
>       which will let us add msgctxts to disambiguate duplicate names
>       (eg the US state of Georgia vs the former Soviet Republic of
>       Georgia).
>
> -- Dan
>
> PS - I'm not actually sure how to regenerate the files in
> libgweather/po-locations/ although some translators apparently know. Any
> hints? It seems like we ought to have a Makefile rule that does that...
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