Re: Proposal: GNOME Docs String Freeze

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj ubuntu com>]

On 2017-05-31 08:40, Andre Klapper wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-05-31 at 02:14 +0200, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> > On 2017-05-30 23:10, Andre Klapper wrote:
> > > My understanding is that the currently non-existing
> > > documentation string freeze is a result of missing (wo)manpower
> > > and the tight release schedule. Assuming that any "late" changes
> > > are actual bug fixes and not cosmetic changes (please correct me
> > > if I'm wrong), I'd prefer correct documentation in English to
> > > incorrect (but translated) documentation.
> >
> > Due to a lack of manpower it will never be perfect, of course, and
> > the later a change is made, the greater is the risk that all the
> > translator teams won't catch up. But isn't it somewhat
> > contradictory to ship 'translated' docs with strings which the
> > translators have not even had a fair *chance* to translate?
>
> Of course that's something to avoid - that's why I differentiated 
> between cosmetic late changes and late bug fixes. As long as there
> are not so many people working on our docs, shipping incorrect (but 
> translated) docs to users sounds worse to me than shipping correct 
> English docs. Would you disagree with this?

Well.. If you restrict "bug fixes" to directly misleading guidance, then 
I agree on 'better correct than translated'.

I look at this from my Ubuntu POV and the desktop guide of the latest 
LTS (long term support) release, where 7 languages are literally 100% 
translated, and another 14 languages are >90% translated. Late changes 
are always an annoyance to translator teams with a high level of ambition.

Now I'm going to encourage the Ubuntu translator teams to be at least as 
good at translating gnome-user-docs upstream as they previously were at 
translating the ubuntu-docs package via Launchpad. (Some of them already 
are, fortunately.) That won't give us more docs writers, but hopefully 
it will help improve the translation coverage a little bit.

> > I for one see Jeremy's proposal as a reasonable step in the right
> > direction.
>
> I'd also agree with Jeremy, //once GNOME had way more people working
> on docs//.

I hear what you say. ;)

Rgds,

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj