launchpad-translators team mailing list archive

[salsaman <salsaman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,
this is my first message to this mailing list. I am the main
developer/maintainer of the LiVES Project (http://lives.sourceforge.net)

First of all I would like to thank the launchpad team for providing such
a great service. Thanks to launchpad, translation is underway in over 25
languages with new ones being added regularly. Secondly, thanks to all
of the many translators who have contributed to LiVES translations.

However, not all is good news. I was recently checking out one of the
translations (Brazilian Portuguese) and I noted a problem with the user
interface. Now LiVES is a very complex tool and it has to show a lot of
information/options on the screen. I have spent a lot of time (many
hours) making sure that everything fits nicely. The problem I noted was
with menubar entries. In the translation, these are somewhat longer than
in the original, which means that the menubar is actually wider than the
screen, which cause problems in th GUI. I have done what I can to fix
this, but there is a limit to what I can do.

The solution is to keep menubar entries as short as possible. For
example, the English "To_ys" is translated in pt_BR as "Brinquedos
[_Y]". First of all, it is not that important to keep menu accelerators
the same, so the translation "_Brinquedos" would suffice.

Secondly, I would like to ask that translators actually test the
application they are translating. If that had been done in this case,
surely somebody would have noted the menubar problems and for example,
shortened "_Brinquedos" to "_Brinq.s" or something similar.

OK, I am not complaining:- this is just general advice for translators
of this particular project. A question then for the launchpad team - I
would like to post the above information on the project translation
page, e.g. as "General advice for translating this project". My
suggestion is that you allow developers/project maintainers to add
advice specific to their project.

Regards,
Salsaman.
http://lives.sourceforge.net
-- 
This message was sent from Launchpad by the user
salsaman (https://launchpad.net/~salsaman)
using the "Contact this team" link on the Launchpad Translators team page.
For more information see
https://help.launchpad.net/YourAccount/ContactingPeople