Re: major libgweather Locations updates

[Ilkka Tuohela <hile iki fi>]

On Aug 5, 2008, at 21:46 , Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 21:42 +0300, Александър Шопов  
> wrote:
> > This immense change is something that I personally do not approve of.
> > Translating cities, huts, hamlets and jerk water somewhere is no
> > particular fun. And there is no particular use of this.
> > I as a coordinator of the Bulgarian Gnome project am putting  
> > translation
> > of the places in gweather in the trash.
> > The developers of gweather can scrape atlases and maps for whatever
> > damn, uninhabited place on Earth (or Moon actually, why the smeg is  
> > Mare
> > Tranquillitatis missing from gweather?) or stranded military base.
> > Life is way too short for this shit.
> > The least they could have done is to have provided us with IPA
> > transcriptions.
> > I cannot think of any motif for their deed but the direst passion  
> > to be
> > blogged about in linuxhaters.
> > Come on guys, you could have contacted the team there directly, no  
> > need
> > for such convoluted ways. This is not the incredible machine, you are
> > not Rube Goldberg.
> > al_shopov
>
> Please keep your rants to yourself, or just send to linuxhaters
> directly.  This kind of language is *not* appreciated.  Neither by
> gweather developers, nor by other translators, or any other member of
> the project, or really, any sane person

Well, I share his desperation with this change, and while his use of  
words is telling things in too harsh or inappropriate ways for many,  
he is kind of right.

The real question is why  we were translating all kind of obscure  
military base names in the first place, and not the approximate place  
names which would make much more sense to anyone living around the  
area. Not trying to blame anyone, it would have been huge task to do  
this right from the beginning, only thing is that now the huge task of  
fixing things is multiplied by languages wishing to keep things fully  
translated 100%.

This might be the most important case of 'get your original  
translations right to start with' we have ever seen. Personally, I got  
tired with gcompris doing pretty much same thing regularly, you get  
20-40% of fuzzy or untranslated strings when the change is just change  
in wording or adding a comma or dot somewhere. Gcompris is developed  
by French people and I understand the reasons why it was not perfect  
to start with, but with gcompris I got too tired follow all the  
changes. I promise to do it 'soon' but...

Our team, finnish, will follow do the tedious task of redoing all of  
gweather before release, I just want to remind everyone: try to write  
good English whenever you write some terms to translate. Any change  
you need to do to original strings mean useless extra work for  
hundreds of translators, even if it's just 'oh they added a comma to  
the phrase'

	*hile*