Re: Rethinking "Supported language"



Wouter Bolsterlee wrote:
Dear all,

Currently, http://www.gnome.org/i18n/ states that a language is officially
"supported" if 80% of the PO files is translated. I think this measure is no
longer valid for modern Gnome releases, because of the 'Development Tools'
suite. It contains the following modules:

  - accerciser
  - anjuta
  - devhelp
  - gdl
  - glade3
  - gnome-build

The problems I see are:

  1.  None of the programs are intended for regular users. Therefor it's
      unreasonable to treat them as such when deciding whether a translation
      is officially "supported".
  2.  Developers will generally use those programs in English anyway. I dare
      to say that there is not a single Dutch speaking user that wants to a
      program such as Glade or Accerciser in Dutch. Translating lots of
      strings that will never be visible to users is just a waste of time.
      Note that most translation teams have very limited resources.
  3.  Since those programs contains more than 3000 strings (3144 according
      to my last count), they account for a substantial part of the total
      number of strings (somewhere in the around 40.000). This very
      negatively impacts the percentage indicating the translation coverage.

My proposal is: only use the modules from the developer platform, desktop
and administration tools when calculating the 80% coverage statistic (i.e.
all module sets but the developer tools).

What do you think?
Whether a language is deemmed as supported or not is a GNOME thing, a piece of information to get into the release notes. As far as I know, the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora) will create language packs for any language, no matter what is the degree of translation completeness.

I feel too it makes sense not to count the dev group of modules in figuring out whether translations are completed by 80% or more.

Simos



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