Re: Translating The GIMP

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On 2 Sep 2001, Sven Neumann wrote:
> > > I know some people will tell me I'm wrong, but for The GIMP part, I do
> > > expect every active translator to be subscribed to the GIMP developers
> > > list which is the place where such announcements do happen (apart from
> > > multiple places in the source tree such as the README). It's not that
> > > we happen to have an untolerable amount of traffic there.
> >
> > Are you kidding? Do you expect us to read *-devel list for every project we
> > make translations for? What is so special about the GIMP?
>
> I'm only encouraging you to do so. Just as I'm subscribed to this list
> even though I'm not a translator for the GTP, I'm also subscribed to about
> a dozen other lists that may someday have discussion that are GIMP related.

With all due respect, I can only interpret your "I do expect every active
translator to be subscribed to the GIMP developers list" as "every
translator has to be subscribed to gimp-devel", and as I've said, I think
that's a really strange requirement. I know you've said that it is
only a recommendation now, but the above was what was in your first mail,
and I think that original statement made no sense whatsoever.

Maybe numbers can help explaining this. You gave one example; 12 mailing
lists that may some day have discussions related to GIMP. Maybe that's
much. Out of the ~ 40 mailing lists I'm subscribed to, around 10 are more
or less related to translations. Most of them are -devel mailing lists of
selected projects (that may some day have discussions about localization),
and some of them are only for translators or translation-related
discussions and announcements, like gnome-i18n. I cannot give the exact
numbers here as I'm not at home with my ordinary computer and mail setup.
But these numbers are not the issue here.

Let's instead have a look at translations. I maintain 158 of them. That's
the number I got when I looked through my web archive with
current translations (http://www.menthos.com/po/) right now. I have
never cared about that number until now, but let's assume every single
maintainer of these 158 applications got the bright idea and demanded
translators to be on their respective -devel mailing list, because
"someday something related to translation might be discussed". And in my
experience of -devel mailing lists, those discussions tend to be in the
very minority -- most of the discussions is about development (surprise!),
patches, complaints from users ("todays CVS broke, boohoo!" ;-), and some
occasional flames or off-topic rants to spice things up.

I think I can barely handle to read all mail I get today from the -devel
mailing lists I'm subscribed to, and sort out the bits that are
interesting to me (which, in most cases, comes down to just
"i18n"). And I should do this for another 150 mailing lists?! I surely
could never do that. And I really doubt anyone can.


> I'm surprised how strongly some of you separate the development of an
> application and its translation.

Maybe it's our instinct of survival.


> There are a lot of decisions an
> application developer has to make that are strongly i18n-related and it
> would be nice if at least some of the translators would read the mailing
> list so they can take part when such decisions are made.

I agree, it's nice when translators *voluntarely* join -devel mailing
lists and help out with suggestions regarding the i18n of the application.
As I've said in earlier mails, I try to do this for a selected few
projects (basically as many as I can).


> The special thing about GIMP is probably that we have a large amount of
> plug-ins and have to deal with handling lots of textdomains and
> translations in numerous packages. This is going to get worse as soon as
> we start to distribute more plug-ins separate from the core as it is our
> intention. I18n is one of the major problems we are going to face then.

Ok. But I think a lot of people on gnome-i18n can help you with advice on
specific i18n problems, if you ask here.


Christian