RE: Translations waiting approval

["Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Cowan [mailto:lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 03:00 +0000, Caroline Ford wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > So it's offensive to send language updates upstream? I've sent patches
> > upstream for broken English and been thanked by the developer. It's
> > hoarding translations that is against the free software model in my
> > opinion.
> >
> 
> Indeed, should we stop submitting bugs in fear of insulting the
> developers?
> 
> I can see your point about some people's English being bad. However, If
> this is the case, the developer should find someone who knows English
> well to cooperate with.
> 
> Hoarding Ubuntu specific "translations" is bad, and possibly a violation
> of the GPL (or whatever licence is used).

There's nothing bad in the fact of sending patches. But remember to be
polite, and not insulting the developers that are doing the hard job you
want to use.

But even if you send patches, they are not required to integrate them within
any scheduled time. There's no emergency, and every one is free to maintain
its own schedule of work. It may even happen that the patch is no longer
needed (because it applies only to a specific version for some parts of
codes that may have changed since then, and that the developers don't want
to maintain for longer time, unless they feel this constitutes an emergency
such as a security issue that could plague many others and discredit their
own project if not solved rapidly.)

However, no translation requires emergency corrections, unless the existing
translation is so bad that it can drive users into making bad decisions
based on false information provided by a bogous translation (or example: "do
you want to delete this file? Yes/No" translated in a way that it really
means "do you want to backup this file?" after bogous or fuzzy/unreviewed
translation).

I've seen such errors in some localized softwares where fuzzy translations
were distributed despite they mixed all sorts of items for unrelated
messages. In that case, it's good to inform the initial developers that the
translation is giving more trouble than it helps. There are some bad
translations or missing translations that could cause troubles, such as
"faux-amis" (the apparently same term meaning different things in different
languages). But all these problems are independent of the language used as
the "root" pseudo-language. All of them may be corrected in a specific
locale, without forcing all projects to adopt pure US English in their root,
when the developers of the packages are not necessarily skilled in correct
US English, and we don't honor them for that part of their job but for the
work they have done in creating and maintaining their code in a way that
they can manage this code easily.

Changing the root language has a big impact on the existing code, it may not
be possible immediately due to the way the code is managed (including within
the history of revisions: it makes merging branches more difficult to do
without errors, if there are too many differences; for various reasons, they
will want to maintain the history in a way that allows them to maintain
several branches simultaneously: some past versions, and some candidate
branches for future revisions or versions, plus, quite often, many automated
tests, not visible in the installable package, that would need to be
manually corrected if the root language has been changed in some dependant
projects).

There may be various reasons why English was not used by these developers,
and they don't have to justify their choice. Nothing forbids you to ask them
to do this change, but please be smart, and don't harass or insult them for
not doing so, when they already provide you the appropriate tool
(gettext+.po/pot files) to create the correct translation you want in US
English.