RE: Translations waiting approval

[Bruce Cowan <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 00:40 +0100, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> You may note that there also exists an en_US team, whose goal is to provide
> a better English translation, for packages whose source was developed by non
> native US English speakers, and whose messages are either poor English, or
> contain a mix of languages, with just a part in English, and many others
> (like internal error messages or rare messages) were left in the sources in
> the non-English native language of the developers that did not know the
> exact term to use in English and used some approximants.

This seems completely pointless. The best way of helping everyone is to
get the original strings fixed in the upstream program, not to do a
Ubuntu specific "translation" like this.

This is why I don't like the concept of Ubuntu translation teams,
because none of their work goes upstream.

> If you look also at software developed in (say) Australia, there are quite
> often a need to relocalize them more precisely for US English. And there are
> also a lot of applications that use a sort of mix of "International English"
> or simple English.

The fact of the matter is that programs for releasing should be written
in US English, with perhaps the author providing a local English
themselves.
> 
> I can also find tons of software packages developed and maintained in German
> or French, and their maintainers do not want to merge in their sources the
> English messages (and have to restart and resynchronize all other existing
> translations that they are already maintaining themselves, given that the
> English language is quite often more ambiguous, for some terminology, than
> the original messages).

Maintainers should take pride in their packages being scrutinised by
people, and if someone wants to suggest better wording, they should be
thankful for it. Sure it means more work, but in my book, it's better to
be right than lazy.

For instance, JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap editor) had a German maintainer,
and as part of my en_GB translation, I found a few bad strings. I then
wrote a patch for these, and it got committed. The same also applies to
Ubuntu's update-manager.
-- 
Bruce Cowan <bcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>