Re: Translating schema files (was: Re: Survey results (yay!))

[Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny eglug org>]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 03:56:12PM +0300, Ihar Hrachyshka wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 15:10, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > On Sat, 2010-10-30 at 13:46 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >> Here is a real example; I just updated gnome-shell translation, the
> >> first ~800 untranslated words are all schema strings, I would have spent
> >> the whole day translating those, but at end of the day there will be no
> >> visible difference to more than 90% of our users. Instead I skipped to
> >> the actual UI strings and was able to make the Shell fully translated to
> >> mos of our users by just translating as few as extra 40 words!
> >
> > That'S ok and reasonable but it works with the system we have now - why
> > should we change anything. Everybody is free to skip strings.
> >
> 
> Hi, I support Khaled's idea.
> 1) It's hard to skip schema messages now since we need to look for dev
> comments for filenames and determine manually whether it's a schema
> message.
> 2) We can't achieve 100% of UI translation without rechecking files
> every time before release on possible appearance of new UI messages.
> And to do it, we should use pofilter or other specific tools to filter
> out unneeded strings. Instead of checking that all UI messages are
> translated (100%), we check whether number of new strings for a module
> changed since last check. That's not very convenient.

Add to that:
3) No matter how hard I try to explain this to new translators, they
will always attempt to translate schema strings, waste their energy on
it and then run away frustrated from complexity of such strings.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer