Re: Lithuanian gnome-office translations

[Gintautas Miliauskas <gintas akl lt>]

Hello everyone,

I coordinate the Lithuanian translation team, and as I understand,
today is my turn to be the punching bag :)

Let me try to explain the situation. Tomas has been maintaining some
GNOME translations, notably, GNOME Office translations, for quite a
while now (several years at least). Recently, Žygimantas Beručka, a
member of the Lithuanian team (and an ex-coordinator) updated the
gnumeric translation and committed it. Žygimantas fixed translations
of some terms (including "File", more on that later), and added some
new translations. Since then, Tomas has been waging an all-out war on
multiple fronts (including emails, a public webpage in English and in
Lithuanian (!), and finally this complaint to gnome-i18n) and
demanding to revert to his previous translation.

I do not see any reason to discard Žygimantas's work just like that by
reverting to a previous state. This is an unreasonable request; I
don't think there's such a thing as a "translator's veto" for
translation by another person. I have asked Tomas to instead report
specific problems with the updated translation, but he did not respond
to that request.

As for the "File" translation dispute, it used to be a huge can of
worms, the reason being that the Lithuanian Language commission
approved three different translations for the word file (I place the
blame on them, by the way, for not making a decision). And public
bickering about this problem was in fact the reason why Žygimantas
resigned from coordinatorship several years ago. Ironically, he got a
lot of flak for pushing "Rinkmena," a more Lithuanian-sounding
alternative translation for "File", into GNOME. Afterwards the
decision was made to use "Failas" throughout GNOME, primarily for
compatibility with other projects and with the then-new translation of
Microsoft Windows. Currently GNOME uses "Failas" everywhere, and if
there are places where a different variant remains, they're there only
because we haven't got to them yet. I definitely do not want to revive
this discussion. It has already burnt way, way too many brain cells
and barrels of oil.

Tomas, I think neither Žygimantas nor I are after credit for the
gnumeric translation. If that's the problem, I'm sure it can be solved
easily. Also, to my knowledge, nobody has claimed that your
contributions are insignificant. It is true that Žygimantas and I
could have been more cooperative with you as the original translator,
but please accept that you have not been very cooperative either - to
the point of asking to restrict our access! That's just rude.

I see Tomas has posted an updated gnumeric translation on Vertimus. I
will go through and merge any fixes in the coming days (could have
done that instead of writing this letter, but oh well...). But again,
the issue of the translation of "File" is not up for discussion.

As for prioritizing translations, I find it an entirely reasonable
practice. Thanks for bringing Orca to my attention, by the way. I had
the impression that it was only a screen reader, and deprioritized it
because there was no voice synthesis engine available for Lithuanian
anyway. I just discovered that it does Braille too, among other
things, and brltty has Lituanian (sic! somebody should fix that)
support. I have removed the deprioritization notice.

I hope this email settles most of the issues that have been raised.

Best regards,
-- 
Gintautas Miliauskas