Hi,
Christoph Noack schrieb:
Am Sonntag, den 18.01.2009, 20:45 +0100 schrieb André Schnabel:
[...]
To get it right, what development version of OOo do we talk about? Is it
3.1 or is your warning about having influence on 3.2 and beyond?
The current example was for 3.1 but this is a general problem (as long
as we have no layout manager).
Oh, then I was not clear enough. Instead of using different button
widths for each language, I thought about increasing the button width in
advance as it is already done today (The dialog "Insert Table" (Table --
Insert -- Table...) for example contains two button widths.).
This works - but not if the original text becomes to long.
So do you think that it's possible to provide a "rule of thumb" (or some
examples) how large such strings could get - even in rare cases?
Currently, I know only [1] which deals with the length of texts.
This is a quite good rule (translated text might be up to three times
the english text).
But it
seems less helpful for the i-Teams being in the (English) development
phase. If we would have a "more precise rule", then this information
should be made available (e.g. adding it to [1] or to the dialog spec I
talked in my previous mail).
There is no more precise rule (unless you like to derive something from
our translation database [2]).
As we do not have a precise rule, we should reduce the risk of either
wasting space or causing troubles for translations. The way to reduce
this risk is simple: keep strings (esp. for buttons) short.
Simple example for the thumb rule:
- For the translation of "Yes" you should reserve space for 6 more
characters. This would look like
[ Yes ]
- For "Keep old styles" you should preserve space for 30 characters
more. This would look like
[ Keep old styles ]
Isn't this a nice button? :)
And - once again, imagine we did not preserve enough space, we might end
up with a button like this:
[p old Sty]
For me, it seems a viable alternative to be a bit more generous with
space until we get the layout manager. It might cause larger dialogs
(and longer mouse movement, covering more background, ...) but it is far
easier to re-size the dialogs afterwards instead of re-designing the
texts.
What do you think?
Given the example above my answer should be obvious.
Btw ... if we once get a layout manager we have tons of texts to
redesign anyway. Just for consistency reasons we would need to review
almost all the texts. Using "new style texts" here and there from now on
would not really help to reduce the work. Actually it would introduce
inconsistencies what is also a bad experience for the user.
Just some other thoughts to this problem - and why it is a problem at all.
Given our current release schedule, localized builds with updated UI
translations are available very late. [3]
l10n teams have only about 2 weeks to review all the translated elements
(what is a very short time, given the fact that you first need to finde
the UI elements before you can verify them).
If problems are found, the only way for UI teams is to raise a stopper
issue, as UI freeze has been passed at this time - and even regular code
freeze has been passed.
This is a problem in the l10n-process and we work to improve this - but
this is, what we have for the moment.
After all - people, using the English version of OOo are a minority.
They are the biggest minority for sure - but for more than 50% of our
users is a risk to be affected by broken translations.
best,
Andre
[1] OpenOffice.org User Interface Text Style Guide: Aware
http://specs.openoffice.org/collaterals/guides/text-style-guide.html#Aware
[2] OOo translations in Pootle
http://pootle.sunvirtuallab.com/languages/
[3] OOo 3.1 release data
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOoRelease31
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