openerp-expert-localization team mailing list archive

[Olivier Dony <odo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/26/2012 07:06 PM, Ray Carnes wrote:
> It is clear many of the terms in OpenERP were decided/writtenby non-native
> English speakers.  For people in English speaking markets, this can make the
> product look unnecessarily amateurish.

We realize this is the case, and for v7 we have done a bit of 
reviewing/cleaning up of the master terms with the help of native english speakers.
Of course we did not cover all 18k terms, and a few thousands new terms were 
also introduced with v7.0, not all of them reviewed.

Any feedback from our translator community would be very much appreciated in 
this regard. And now is probably the best time to collect this feedback, 
especially on the newly introduced terms (before too much effort is wasted on 
translating them). See below...


> *_What is the best way to have community translation efforts_**_for American
> English?_**_  Create another language?_*  I understand you need one anchor
> language for terms.  You have a community in the USA that would love to help
> translate but from what I can tell, everyone does it on their own and doesn't
> collaborate very well.

Creating another language is pretty tedious and I would suggest to only use 
"en_US" translation entries as a workaround, when it is really necessary for a 
customer project. For the future it is always be best to try to fix the master 
terms in the "trunk" version. It may sometimes cause a bit of translation loss, 
but when done for good reasons it will also make the job of international 
translators easier in the future.

As we indeed use US English as anchor/master language, we should not alter the 
terms too much on stable versions, but we can use the opportunity of a new 
release to improve them.

In order to make some progress on this, we can start a collaborative pad (as 
already suggested by some people) where native english speakers can suggest 
corrections to the "master terms" that are used for v7.0 (i.e. the current 
terms in trunk).
I created a pad where you could start, and we'll see how it works out:
  http://pad.openerp.com/english-review

Please keep in mind that this is a continuous improvement process and we will 
not be able to change hundreds of terms for v7.0 (not to mention the extra 
burden it would create for translators). So let's concentrate on the most 
important/confusing terms and obvious typos, and not waste time with terms that 
are not 100% wrong or confusing. For example don't waste your time on 
variations (e.g. "team" vs "sales team", "manufacturing" vs "production"); we 
will ignore them unless it's clear that the term is 100% wrong in that context 
and creates a lot of confusion.

If the contents of this pad contains a manageable amount of good suggestions I 
will make sure they get corrected before the final 7.0 release.

Let me know what you think...

Thanks for your invaluable contributions!