Re: www.gnome.org

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Thilo Pfennig <tp pfennigsolutions de>, Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:33:08 +0100:

> Petr Kovar schrieb:
> > Otherwise, it seems to be quite controversial and, may I say,
> > disrespectful towards translators, whose work, in my humble
> > translator's opinion, is as good and as bad as any other contributions.
> >   
> Its obvious. Professional translation is a very complex task. 

The same way as is the professional software development.

> You can
> not expect a high quality from volunteers who often do not have any
> training and are often developers who also do translations. In relation
> to code I guess its often the case that programers aho work on GNOME are
> professional programmers - not all - but many. 

How many of them are "professionals", actually? 50 %? 25%? 75 %? And what
can you expect from the rest? A poor quality code? So is, say, 50 % of the
code of poor quality because it was produced by volunteers?

> The argument that I made
> was made in a specific context - that it would be desirable to have the
> whole site translated. The question I rose was in fact if it is better
> to have a good original english page or rather a not so good
> translation. 

And what about having a good original English page, and an excellent
translation? A possibility you didn't mention somehow. Try to trust the
GNOME l10n work a little bit more, please.

> So I did not start a thread to disrespect translators. In

Maybe you didn't intend so, but your generalization is actually
strongly disrespectful.

> Moin wiki not all help pages are translated because the translations
> often do not take up the changes fast enough. So generally there is a
> translation - but the goal is rather to have a good documentation as one
> that is outdated, wrong and often of lower quality. How can you say the
> quality is high? 

You ask me how? Well, I'm part of the process and I see what I see,
that is committed volunteers and also professional translators (surprise!)
working thoroughly on l10n, using various types of linguistic tools and
having a complex and professional-like team work flow at the same time.

So their translation outputs may not be always of professional quality,
but hey, you can't say there's no possibility it may be so. That's my point
here.

> I guess you cant prove the opposit either. 

For what it's worth, you should know that I don't have to. ;-)

> So better
> what makes you think the quality can be high? 

See above.

> I am sure people who
> translate are motivated and do their best - and it often helps greatly,
> especially on user interfaces and documentation. I did this myself for
> the german epiphany manual. But I know my shortcomings as well as I see
> those of other german translators. It does not matter if I say it or if
> I do not. Everybody can see it.

I don't think so, really. I'm afraid you don't have the necessary insight
here (I can't speak for the German translation team, but... you didn't speak
about the German one only in your original statement, anyway). Or maybe
there's this indefensible generalization of yours just because you want to
move the website things the way you want at any cost, with or without the
translations. But let me tell you that you picked the wrong part on this
one.

Best,
Petr Kovar

PS to others: sorry for being slightly off-topic.