Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2003-10-01 klockan 22.28 skrev Ismael Olea:
> Anyway, this not means we shouldn't learn how to improve the work from
> the ones with more advanced and proved technologies and methods
> available.

We should certainly be open to new ideas and what others are doing and
using, there's no doubt about that, and I certainly think myself that
it's unfortunately too common in the free software world to ignore what
others, including proprietary software companies, are doing.

But I think automatically classifying anything we've done so far or
currently do as inferior, and everything else done by others as
automatically more advanced, more "proved" or superior by any other
non-factual means or not backed up statements serves no good purpose at
all.

Evaluation should be based on facts on actual advantages and
disadvantages, not hey "X does use method Y and X is after all X, hence
method Y must be more advanced and better than our method". That's just
a very non-factual evaluation based on perceptions of an image rather
than facts, like producers of tv commercials want us to do all the time,
and equally distanced from the actual benefits and drawbacks.

One fact in this case is that po format has been used very successfully
in who knows how many projects for many, many years. Even though it has
its drawbacks, that certainly would count as "proven" in most books.
Another fact is that many big companies are looking at GNOME and other
free software projects as rescuers nowadays -- they wouldn't use or
market our software unless they actually thought themselves that they
could use it or have something to learn or otherwise benefit from it.
Whether that also extends to localization efforts I don't know, but it's
not something that we should forget or ignore. We and our methods most
likely aren't as inferior as we may sometimes think.

So I not only think your picture of how our work and methods are
automatically inferior just by being used by (perhaps the worlds largest
groups of) volunteer translators instead of proprietary projects is very
discouraging, but I also think it's likely to be far away from the
actual reality.

Anyway, this is getting seriously offtopic now.


Christian