Re: gnome-applets string freeze breakage

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 03:18:13 +0800, Davyd Madeley
<davyd bridgewayconsulting com au> wrote:

> Without wanting to tell the translators how to do their job. I don't
> see how having the string marked for translation is necessarily a
> bad thing. The string is not likely to ever be user visible, but if
> translators want they can translate it. Hence, the only thing it
> will affect is people's 100% ratings. Without being in on the
> culture, is this an issue?

Although I am not a translator, I believe you may be looking at this
from the wrong angle.  Rather than "does it hurt that much", I think
breaking freezes should be viewed as "do I have a really solid reason
for doing this".

Here are some educated *guesses*, however, at answering your question:
I don't believe there is a mechanism in place for marking strings as
important versus not-very-important for translation.  Translators just
check the stats to see what they have untranslated, get an updated
version of the module, and then find the untranslated string and
translate it.  Leaving the new strings in there means translators do
extra work--either to translate the string or even to just find out
that the string is "unimportant" and doesn't need to be translated. 
Further, freeze breakages typically mean that something important has
changed, so you're actually giving somewhat of the opposite impression
from what you want.  When you consider that there's tons of
translators, adding up all the extra time required for all translators
will probably usually outweigh the cost of reverting a string.

And, of course, there's always the problem with slippery slopes as well...


Thanks for your hard work on gnome-applets,
Elijah