Re: open translations database

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Hi Aoife (and Gerry)!


Aoife Dunne - Sunsoft ELC wrote:
> Gerry Ekstrom is our Swedish freelancer, his e-mail is
> "keekorok@eircom.net".  I chatted to Gerry and he is very
> interested in getting involved.
> 
> Gerry spent a few hours looking at the overall Swedish quality
> of Gnome and found it to be very good.  At a high level, the
> main issues reported were as follows (see the attached QA report
> for details).  The report outlines suggested changes, however,
> the translators are the experts of the product, so feel free not
> to take our suggestions on board.

I've had a look, it was very interesting indeed. I personally agree with
most of Gerry's comments. Most of the problems are real translation
errors, due to sloppy translations/too little coffee at 03:00 in the
morning. Or something :)


> * A lot of applications had untranslated text.

I think this applies to everything about free software translation :-)
There's always a shortage of manpower, and often the release
coordination is non-existant with regards to documentation and
translation (lack of communication). So a translator might not even know
that a new release is on its way, and the software is released with
whatever is in it in terms of translation at release time.
The manpower issue is part of why we (I at least) had hopes about Sun
having manpower, to help making everything translated :-)


> * Extended characters ÅÄÖåäö are sometimes displayed AA,AE,OE,aa,ae,oe.

I think this is a software problem, not a problem with translation per
se. We never put "transcribed" iso-8859-1 (latin-1) characters in
translation .po:s. That would be an almost as terrible thing to do as
translating with Babelfish :)

I think they get like this when the program is for some reason not set
to display iso-8859-1 characters correctly (for example when the locale
is not set properly). When a problem like this occurs, they're
automatically "transcribed" into US-ASCII (at least that's what I
think).
So this is a coding problem, and one the program developers should be
notified of. Maybe Sun could help with this as part of its QA help?


> *  Some Inconsistencies

Yes, unfortunately, there are. We try to keep them to a minimum, but as
long as there are several translators, there will be issues with
inconsistencies. We have our own online word list with common terms
(http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d95mback/gnome/ord.shtml) but it lacks a
lot, and it's easy to forget to use it :-)


I had an initial check on Gerry's report. I couldn't find any of the
problems Gerry mentioned in my copy of gedit (0.9.2). Everything was
properly translated, except one single untranslated "Help" menu item.
Gerry's report didn't mention any gedit version number, so it might have
been checked against an older version.


> Christian, let me know how we can help.

We in the Swedish team look forward to working with Gerry. :)
Normally we use the sv@li.org mailing list to discuss Swedish GNOME
translations. This is the mailing list for the Swedish part of the
Translation Project, but we're all friends, and as most of us Swedish
GNOME translators are translators in the Translation Project too, we use
their list for discussing GNOME translations. Discussions are in
Swedish, and subscription info is on
http://www.uddeborg.pp.se/sv/dok-2.html.

Also, many of us usually hang out on the #swedesex IRC channel (yes,
that channel name is a joke, and nothing else) on irc.se.gimp.org.
Occasionally, Swedish translations are discussed there too.


Christian



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Christian Rose
http://www.menthos.com                    	    menthos@menthos.com
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