Re: Use of American/British English

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2004-02-23 klockan 14.52 skrev Andreas J. Guelzow:
> > Every application in the desktop using its own English flavour is not
> > the recipe for a consistent desktop experience.
> 
> Sorry, but how could the `desktop experience' be affected by the
> language of the original strings? The user will see the translated
> strings only, so only they need to be consistent for a 'consistent
> desktop experience'.

Not really -- many users will not use any message translation, either by
running in the C or en_US locales, or not having any NLS/gettext support
enabled at all. This could be either on purpose (say, users happy with
American English messages and wanting to cut all *.[g]mo files because
of space restrictions), or by accident, due to a misconfigured locale
(in general it seems surprisingly many not entirely unfamiliar
distributions do not configure default locales correctly.)

Thus, I don't think translations should ever be treated as the polish
glue where all problems with underlying strings are to be fixed. Not the
least because the "ignore cause of bug, fix it instead in more than 60
other places on top of it" concept is fundamentally flawed. This is true
both for typos, grammar problems, terminology inconsistencies as well as
any other string problem.
We can't assume a user uses any translation. We provide translations,
but our desktop must be of the same quality even for those that don't
use those.


> Of course, I agree that it will make the life easier for translators to
> use one consistent spelling and terminology in the source strings across
> the GNOME desktop. And en_US seems to be the spelling in use in most
> programs.

Yes indeed.


Christian