Re: Modified strings up to release date

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 12:45 +0200, Claude Paroz wrote:
> Le lundi 22 septembre 2008 à 11:01 +0200, Andre Klapper a écrit :
> > Am Montag, den 22.09.2008, 07:01 +0200 schrieb Jorge González González:
> > > there have been modifications of document strings up to the very same
> > > date of release, this is very sad. We already talked about "freezing"
> > > somehow doc translations so we could do our job, but developers keep
> > > updating it up to today.
> > > 
> > > I know there is no freeze for docs, but still, you, developers, cannot
> > > think we can translate like this.
> > 
> > I think we have this discussion in release-team every time we meet.
> > It boils down to the problem "Having better (updated) english
> > documentation vs. having more translated (but outdated) documentation".
> > Pick your poison.
> > For me it looks less useful to have translated but outdated docs.
> 
> Sorry Andre, but I completely disagree here. The choice is not the one
> you presented. I could say the same with other freezes. E.g. with the UI
> freeze : do you want better and more polished UI rather than well tested
> and documented but minimal and uglier ones because of the freeze...

As I've pointed out before, this analogy doesn't hold water.
It's not a matter of making the documentation more polished.
It's a matter of making it correct.

If a program needs a string addition to give a user information
in the case of some error, that's polish.  If the documentation
is telling you to click on button XYZ, but button XYZ does not
exist in the program, that's just flat out wrong.  There is no
point in translating that sentence, because there are exactly
zero users who would be helped by reading it.

> It's a matter of process. When you put a freeze in place, you're simply
> telling people that they have to do their job in a specific timeframe.
> The objective here is to have updated AND translated docs.

Stormy had a great blog post a few days back, talking about
how project releases are constrained by time, resources, and
scope.  We currently have a fixed amount of time, and have a
very difficult time increasing our resources (i.e. writers).
Our scope (i.e. documentation quality) suffers.

If you decrease our time without increasing our resources,
documentation quality will suffer.

Please don't claim there is no respect for translators, as
you did in a previous email.  That's pure flamebait.  I put
a lot of work (along with Danilo) into making translators
able to do documentation with po files.  I wrote an entire
DocBook toolchain in part because the existing solutions
didn't serve our translators well.

I have put a lot of development time into making sure you
can have properly translated documentation.  But I will
not take precious time away from our few valiant writers,
just so you can have a translated version of a document
that's not even correct or helpful in English.

--
Shaun