On the status of Pan translations

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Charles Kerr wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
> Since you're one of the most active Pan translators and are also active
> in the gnome-i18n community, you seem like a good person to ask: am I
> doing something wrong or missing something in trying to get translations
> up-to-date?  I have not gotten many responses and the majority of the
> po files are out of date.
>
> If this is just the way things go with a volunteer effort then that's fine.
> But if I'm doing something wrong I'd like to fix it. :)
>
> cheers,
> Charles


Hi Charles,

Thank you for your mail. I'm replying also to the gnome-i18n@gnome.org
mailing list, since I suspect that other persons on this list might also
like to share this discussion.

My personal opinion is that you are doing nothing wrong, on the contrary.
You have as far as I remember always taken great care of mailing the
gnome-i18n mailing list in advance and warned translators about upcoming
releases well in advance. I would like to express a deep "thank you" for
that!

It's probably just that Pan has been around for a long time, and has
gathered many translations during that time. However, translation teams
are not always static, many of them come and go. Some of the translation
teams are very small (in a lot of cases only one person) and sometimes
only active for a short while - they quickly become a reality when some
person expresses interest in translating into his/her language, and goes
unmaintained when this person some time later loses interest or doesn't
have as much free time anymore. Sometimes another person picks up later
on and maintains the translations for that language, and in other cases
they seem to go in eternal sleep mode, completely unmaintained.
So my guess would be that many (probably not all though) of the unupdated
Pan translations are from dormant translation teams that once upon a time
had the time to provide a Pan translation, but that things have changed
since then.

So I don't have a solution, and I'm not completely convinced that there
even is a possible solution, that I'm unaware of, to this broader problem.
It's probably just the way of free software - translation maintainers
come and go, and some translations keep being maintained and some die,
just like application maintainers come and go and some applications live
on forever, and some die a silent, forgotten death.

You've done your best to inform active translators about the need of Pan
translation updates (and once again I would like to thank you for that),
but there's probably not much to do with the unactive translators. In any
case, I think even the unmaintained translations should continue to be
shipped with Pan, in case someone decides to continue the work on a
particular translation.


Cheers,
Christian