avoid 'fixes' in translations

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi translators,

This is my opinion on a topic that I don't know a lot about.  I think
I'm right, but I'd like feedback.

I recently noticed this bug:

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612698

While I agree with the fact that it is wrong to have "MB" meaning
anything other than "1 million bytes", I disagree with the idea that
translation is an appropriate means by which to fix this problem.

I also noticed a similar problem in the Canadian English translations at
one point -- lots of silly things like "can not" being changed to
"cannot".

Translation should attempt to best-preserve what was said by the person
who said it -- not what they might have said if they had a different
opinion on a topic (like the way in which units should be used).  It
doesn't matter if this opinion is wrong -- that should be filed as a bug
and fixed in the source strings.  Doing this in translations only fixes
the problem for a small subset of the users.

There's also another problem with this approach.  Taking the "MB"/"MiB"
example: if an application were incorrectly using "MB" to mean "1048576
bytes" then a translator may feel justified in translating it to "MiB".
Meanwhile, a bug could be filed against that application to change their
incorrect usage of "MB".  When that app makes the change, "MB" now means
1000000.  The translation, however, will still be converting "MB" to
"MiB", so we have a situation where "MiB" means 1000000 bytes, which is
just totally insane.  This is not theoretical -- this very case occurred
in GLib for quite some languages and the bug report I linked to above is
discussing doing it in file-roller where I notice that the Spanish and
Norwegian Nynorsk translations have already done the same.

TL;DR: If you disagree with how something is written in the English
string, please file a bug against the relevant component.  Never use
translation as a way to 'fix' bugs or change something that you disagree
with.

Cheers