Re: The translator credits

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Chema Celorio wrote:
> Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> > This doesn't help to solve the problem.  The main problem is: where to
> > report translation bugs/errors?  The solution is easy: Provide the team
> > address:
> >
> >     TEXTDOMAINDIR=$GNOMEDIR/share/locale gettext gnumeric "" | grep ^Language-Team
> >     ==>
> >     Language-Team: German <de li org>
> 
> Why doesn't it solve the problem ?
> You open the about dialog box and you get :
> 
> Gedit Tranlated by :
> 
> Spanish  Joe Fox <joe fox com>
> German   Kirk A  <kirk a com>
> .....
> 
> In a scrooled window. See "About Gnome".

I agree with Karl.
I think it's a usability problem. The translator list can get _very_
long, something not illustrated in your example.
Also, when providing a "complete" list, you are doing the user a
disfavor if he just wants to know "what idiot" translated the app into
his language, and wants to direct some suggestions to that person. :-)
If you provide all adresses like in your example, you have to scroll a
huge list to actually find the information you're probably most
interested in (next to the author info of course).

I think that only the authors and the last-translator for the current
locale should be displayed, together with the translation team address
(and maybe the last-translators own address), as this is the information
that the user probably wants. If I'm using Swedish all the time, the
info about who translated the app into Klingon is probably of little
importance to me, since I don't use Klingon at all.


I realize however that it is nice if all contributors could be honored.
Maybe the about dialog should have a "Show all contributors" tab in the
future, where all living (and dead) persons who had ever contributed to
the app could be presented in a nice, auto-scrolling list. This could
also show past translators (fetched from po file header comment) in
addition to all last-translators.
But that view shouldn't be the default, the default should only show the
most important contributor info (namely the authors and the
last-translator for the locale used). What do you think of that idea?


Also, if somebody redesigns the default about box, could that horrible
green color be scrapped? ;-)


Christian



#######################################################################
Christian Rose
http://www.menthos.com                    	    menthos menthos com
#######################################################################