i18n and GNOME hackers

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Hi everyone,

as Mandriva cooker users has probably noticed, I recently updated Cooker
to GNOME 2.10.1 (and all other versions from 2.10.x modules released
until now) and I was a little troubled by i18n regressions I found in it
compared to 2.8. Usually, strings were correctly translated in various
languages but some code was wrong (not using the correct gettext
catalog, or similar error) and nobody seems to have notice those
regressions yet. This is frustrating for everybody because translators
did their jobs but it is not used and user experience degrades. I've
started reporting and/or fixing those problems, it isn't finished yet
but I plan to finish this in July (when I'll be back online).

Since I'm a french speaking person, working for a distribution which try
to improve i18n support for a lot of languages around the world, I tend
to be quite sensitive to this kind of problem, but it seems a lot of
non-english native speaking GNOME hackers are using GNOME in english,
which often defeat dogfooding our own work.

So, if you are a non-english native speaker GNOME hacker (or if you are
fluent enough to use GNOME in another language than english), please use
it by default on your system and report bugs (when translations is there
but not displayed). And of course, this call is also valid for
translators who usually know which parts of applications they have
already translated.

Thanks for hearing my "complain" :)
-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva