Chris Lyttle wrote:
Now we have a choice moving forward, to cut the translated docs so thatI kind prefer the latter.
perhaps someone using GnuCash will be encouraged to write new ones or
translate my new help to their language or to include the old docs in
the hope that someone will see the english docs are better and proceed
to translate.
Sorry, I have to object here. Please don't think first about potential translators -- think first about actual users, which make up 99,5% of the downloads. If they click on "Help" and (since an old, crappy transaction happens to exist in their locale) get a really outdated crappy version of docs, they are really pissed off ("Can't these guys write correct documentation instead of this piece of sh*t?"). If they would get an up-to-date help that just happens to still be in english, the overall impression is *much much* better ("Ok, they don't have a translated help, but at least it's up to date and tells me how things work.")
As for translators -- don't underestimate them. Every translator knows what he/she's doing. Every one knows that if there is an exhaustive english documentation, it's gonna be a lot of work to translate it. An existing but crappy documentation doesn't lower the barrier at all. It just turns off users. Therefore I absolutely agree with Chris here, and I really disagree with Linas here. Please don't keep outdated translations around.
For example: message catalogs: gnucash-1.4 had more translations than 1.6 ever did (or 1.7 does, to this day). Some of the translations that were cut never came back. (ukrainian is one that comes to mind).
Please don't compare apples and oranges here. How many message strings did 1.4 have? I'm too lazy to lookup, but I guess it was some number below 1000. 1.6 had 1600, and we eventually arrived at 13 (thirteen) complete translations nevertheless. 1.8 will have 2600. Every new release re-used the translations from the old release, but you can only reuse translations for identical messages. It is simply wrong to talk about "translations that were cut back". Of course if your message catalog is smaller it is more likely to have more translations. If your application (and thus the message catalog) grows, it is less likely to quickly get complete translations. And, as the existing translated messages remain at its fixed number, the translated fraction will of course shrink when the absolute number of messages grows.
I'm kind of upset about Linas' statements here since they sound like he's blaming somebody (e.g. the rest of the gnucash team) for "messing up with translations" or similar. Truth is, there is nobody to blame for the "reducing number" of translations. It is simply a direct outcome of the overall growth of the application.
Christian
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
