Re: Translations waiting approval

> > 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.

I don't think your opinions representative of FOSS-developers in general.

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?

You loose stuf in translation, that is unavoidable. Therefore it is of great importance for the quality of localisation that they are the result of only _one_ translation. But this again means, that if you want you software localized, it will orginally have to be written in one of the mayor languages, because otherwise there won't be people in the small contries that know the original language.

> 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.

But development is not just about coding, proper GUI-polishing is just as much a part of that development-process.

Regards Kenneth Nielsen