Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Jordi Mallach <jordi gnu org>]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 05:48:34AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Looks like one thing we need to encourage is conversions from partly to
> fully supported translations - are some translators not keeping up with
> changes? Do we have too many changes too late in the release process? The
> stats are based on CVS, but do we know if these are even released? Perhaps
> our tarballs are even worse! :-)

In my experience (I have been translating GNOME since 1.3/pre2.0), the 2.4
release process was quite negative in the i18n front. The final list of
modules was announced way too late, adding a zillion new strings to our
modules. Some teams can't cope with that workload, and in consequence,
they don't reach 90% (the established limit to consider stuff as
"supported").

Another issue is if translations are ever released, yes. There's a list
of modules in the status pages that haven't done a release in years, and
despite this, the teams allocate time to translate them, because they
show up in the status pages. Also, once GNOME 2.x.0 is released, you
count on tarballs being made for 2.x.1, but many times this only happens
if there are non-i18n bugfixes to be made on the given module. If the
package is Good(tm), it's easy that you won't see another version, so
your translation won't be used by anyone until GNOME 2.(x+1).0 where,
surprise, it might have rotten again.

I don't know about what is included in the KDE statistics, but in GNOME,
these statistics include the schemas description translations, which are
useful just for a minor percent of our users. It'd be nice to be able to
separate the stats for schemas from glade, source and .desktop files,
which are user-visible, but it's not easy to do so. This means that
maybe you have a core module that is 60% translated, just because
schemas were added to POTFILES.in, so even if the program is fully
translated, the statistics say the contrary.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi@sindominio.net     jordi@debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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