Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2004-01-05 klockan 12.15 skrev Bill Haneman:
> >Looking at this from a GNOME 2.5/2.6 perspective, and looking at the
> >"proposed" section of http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/modules/, I think
> >there is unfortunately a danger of this piece of history repeating
> >itself, perhaps even more than before. There are modules like dasher
> >that are not even in GNOME cvs yet, and which GNOME translators have had
> >little chance to work on and little possibility to try to find the
> >problems in time.
>
> FWIW, I think Dasher has very few translatable strings.

True. It seems dasher *is* in fact in GNOME cvs now, and I've had a
chance to look at it.


> There may be other i18n issues with it (for instance it requires
> character-sequence frequency data which may not be available for all
> languages), but msgstr translation is unlikely to be a problem IMO.

Ok, I'm bound to agree after looking at it. Anyway, here are my findings
so far:

* The module is completely anonymous, i.e. no contact e-mail addresses
in any toplevel AUTHORS, MAINTAINERS or README file that I could spot.
This should be easy to fix, but in its present state it's difficult to
know whom to contact about any issues in the module, which is a kind of
problematic state of affairs.

* No GNOME Bugzilla product for it (again, if there was a contact for
it, we could help with fixing this)

* Messages use British English spellings (nothing against British
English, but GNU and GNOME software are supposed to be standardized on
American English spellings, see
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#language).

Obviously, nothing of this is really serious or difficult to fix, but
having these issues be fixed might help a lot.


Christian