Translating schema files (was: Re: Survey results (yay!))

[Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>]

Hi!

> So, just stripping out the gconf/dconf schemas we are getting 17% less
> words to translate!

> If we do the same with the errors (much harder to do the analysis
> though) we could nearly shrink the number of words to translate, at
> least to 30% (so ~60k words less).
> 
> On the other side, or to further bold this argument, with the new
> moduleset proposal made by the release team, more and more applications
> are going to pop up, so more strings/words to translate...
> 
> Now that we have the numbers ... what do you think? Would it make sense
> to propose the release team to ask to create different po files
> depending on the string type (schema, error and general)?

Well, I disagree here: A complete translation of a desktop means to me
that all user-visible strings are translated. And that includes error
messages on the terminal as well as dconf schemas (that are shown at
least in dconf-editor and possibly in the to be developed GNOME
configuration tool).

The gtk+ properties are a bit different here because they are definitly
only shown to developers and not to users (except in glade, but there
user = developer).

Futher, I think extra po files complicate the build system quite a bit
and I really don't want to do that for my modules (anjuta has about 20
schema files though they aren't translated at all atm).

I feel this is the pseudo discussion for teams reaching yx % while it is
far more important that it is convenient for the user. You can have 95%
without translating nautilus and the user would still feel that half of
the translation is missing. These numbers are just for our egos...

And 6% of the strings isn't really much. The difference between
translating a word and a string is mostly marginal if the strings isn't
five sentences long.

Regards,
Johannes