RE: Translations waiting approval

["Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Cowan [mailto:lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] wrote:
> 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.

Did I say this applied for "Ubuntu" exclusively? Launchpad is not supposed
to be hosting Ubuntu-only projects. Whatever Ubuntu does, if the packages it
is releasing wants to respect the authors, it will have to adapt to the
packages exactly the way they are written by their respective authors,
located worldwide.

> 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.

Not necessarily. A program can be well written and maintained by skilled
people that masterize the subject, and working in teams that better work in
another language, and still want to maintain the ease of designing it in
their preferred language.

If you try convincing them to convert to US English, they will produce poor
translations, or inconsistent terminology, and this will benefit to nobody,
not even the tentative translators that would try to localize the program.

> > 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.

And insulting by your own words ! Try repeat that sentence to the authors
and they will reject any of your proposed translation "corrections". Don't
require them things for a work that you did not produce yourself, and for
which you did not invest as much time as the authors that may have worked on
it possibly during years before gently releasing it to an open-source or
free commons ! If you insult them, they will stop delivering their updates
to the project, and will return to the closed development model and the
remaining open-sourced project will stall or will split the efforts.

Really be much smarter and accept the fact that en_US may just be a
localization of the original package still kept in its existing language
until the developers decide together to change such thing. What is your
problem with it? Do you want that all software run without needing any .po
package because you don't like them? If performance is a (futile) issue,
then explain that to those that are using these localization files and have
supported the localization efforts since long. You're just fighting against
the efforts supported by Launchpad, and have no interest on this
collaborative work. Then what are you doing here in this list?

> 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.

And the maintainer may have better priorities than fixing those strings in
their sources. Keep them with the freedom of understanding their own program
and maintaining it cleanly.