Re: Proposal: GNOME Docs String Freeze

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 5:00 AM Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj ubuntu com> wrote:

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
_______________________________________________

FWIW, I agree with Andre that it's better to have correct documentation shipped than incorrect with translations.  I know this last cycle, I was fixing bugs right up until the release, which I know can be frustrating for translators, but we had some old bugs I could fix.

Paul