Re: More than 400 new strings inside gnome-control-center

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Arafat Medini <lumina@silverpen.de> writes:

> ...and then do a work which will be obsolete anyway ?!

It won't be obsolete, it will be transferred someplace else (into
another module). Just like no translation was wasted because
translators translated Gtk+ in its entirety before it was split into
two translation domains, I expect here to be the same case.

> I know as an Arabic translatator that gnome is not wide-spread in the
> Arabic region so I know translating these 400 strings will harm myself
> and the Arabic support for maybe not being 100% (or being it with more
> work I have to invest) but it will not have any benefit on the languages
> region, this applies for many other languages don't forget that the
> majority of languages are of regions where gnome is not really
> wide-spread.

This 400 messages is less than 2% of entire translation. This means
that you may well not translate them at all, and still get into the
group of supported languages in Gnome (which is one milestone; the
other is getting to 100%).

Since we're talking about country names, I'd suggest you to copy
English names as "translations" (C-j in Emacs po-mode), except in a
few cases where Arabic is official language.  Then, once you find some
time, you'd be able to translate the rest, and this addition would
not have a bad effect on your translation status.

I don't understand the relation of "Gnome-widespreadness" with any of
this, so it'd be nice if you explained it a bit more.

> So this whole talk leads me to my big concern: why do I have to invest
> work on strings which will be duplicated?! 400 strings are much...

Sure they are much. But this is the issue of having them localized at
all, or not having them localized.  There are a lot of problems that
we have started fixing only recently (like the inclusion of iso639
and iso3166 domains on TP), so we've got a chicken-and-egg problem
here: if we don't advocate this, nobody will bother to translate. If
nobody bothers to translate, we'd never have an option to include
them, because they'll always be a lot of untranslated messages.

>
> On the sidenote, we can't really "reuse" existing translations, the only
> way (at least for me) was to use an auto-translator which is not
> accurate which made me go the strings again anyway...
>

Reusing is possible if you (or someone else) have translated iso639
and iso3166 domains via Translation Project. 

Other modules in Gnome did have at one time or the other some country
names, but none of them really had a complete list.


And finally, I'm not for nor against this inclusion at this time. I
understand the value it would bring, but I understand the troubles
for translators as well. So, this is certainly a welcome addition,
but I'm just not sure if it's welcome at *this* particular moment.

Cheers,
Danilo