Re: Obsolete Belarusian translations

[Ihar Hrachyshka <ihar hrachyshka gmail com>]

Hi Piotr,

On 10/08/2012 11:32 PM, Piotr Drąg wrote:
> It's sad to see translations removed, even if they are old and
> problematic.

Some kinds of translations are better being removed than be shown to
users as-is. That's the whole story about some old Belarusian translations.

I agree typos and problems should be fixed in place, not destroyed with
the whole translation. But not in case where you have almost every
translated message with lots of typos, mistakes and weird, self-created
terminology for such common words like 'server', 'application', or 'draft'.

In such case, you have two things to do if you have your users in mind:

1) (the best one) rewrite translation from scratch;
2) (the worse one) don't show bad translation in UI till 1. is done.

At the end, the whole reason to use translation is to ease perception of
translatable messages, not to make it even harder.

> I understand that your team is understaffed (or even this is an
> understatement? :D), but maybe you could reach out to translators of
> other FLOSS projects?
> 

As for any minor language with little support fron any officials, the
whole Belarusian language community is understaffed (not i18n only).

You know, we are doing quite well in the team (official supported
language status, high standards for contributions). I would say, GNOME
is a single desktop environment (proprietary world included) with
significant Belarusian coverage out there.


> Anyway, thank you for your great work!
>

Thanks for attention to git activity. It's good to know that someone
looks for any suspicious actions in the tree.

/Ihar