Re: Rethinking "Supported language"

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

Wouter Bolsterlee wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Currently, http://www.gnome.org/i18n/ states that a language is officially
> "supported" if 80% of the PO files is translated. I think this measure is no
> longer valid for modern Gnome releases, because of the 'Development Tools'
> suite. It contains the following modules:
>
>   - accerciser
>   - anjuta
>   - devhelp
>   - gdl
>   - glade3
>   - gnome-build
>
> The problems I see are:
>
>   1.  None of the programs are intended for regular users. Therefor it's
>       unreasonable to treat them as such when deciding whether a translation
>       is officially "supported".
>   2.  Developers will generally use those programs in English anyway. I dare
>       to say that there is not a single Dutch speaking user that wants to a
>       program such as Glade or Accerciser in Dutch. Translating lots of
>       strings that will never be visible to users is just a waste of time.
>       Note that most translation teams have very limited resources.
>   3.  Since those programs contains more than 3000 strings (3144 according
>       to my last count), they account for a substantial part of the total
>       number of strings (somewhere in the around 40.000). This very
>       negatively impacts the percentage indicating the translation coverage.
>
> My proposal is: only use the modules from the developer platform, desktop
> and administration tools when calculating the 80% coverage statistic (i.e.
> all module sets but the developer tools).
>
> What do you think?
>   
Whether a language is deemmed as supported or not is a GNOME thing, a 
piece of information to get into the release notes. As far as I know, 
the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora) will create language packs for any 
language, no matter what is the degree of translation completeness.

I feel too it makes sense not to count the dev group of modules in 
figuring out whether translations are completed by 80% or more.

Simos