On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 22:39, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: >> >> This wouldn't solve the issue of having 100% complete translations at >> time of release. But it seems that for overall translation >> completeness Translatewiki is working great for OSM. We both have >> active OSM contributors, and an active general translation community >> contributing.
Before I go any further I'd just like to point out that the above was just a humble suggestion of the form "if you're interesetd, you can do X, maybe". I'm not saying JOSM should do anything in particular, I just wanted to point out the option since we've had success with this approach for the website and Potlatch. > To be honest I'm not keen on having anything translated by members of a > general translation community. There are many things which, I believe, need > the OSM context to be translated properly. FWIW JOSM is already available for translation by the larger community. It's open to anyone with a Launchpad account, and if you go into their statistics as a translator it'll be listed amongst $very_large_number of programs that you might want to translate into language X. Using another translation service would potentially make it more popular, but it wouldn't change that. > I recently changed the E->D translation on launchpad for a number of OAuth > related items. I don't remember what the problem was exactly but it was > clear that the translator did not know anything about how OAuth works, but > just chose context-free translations of the terms involved. This resulted in > a very skewed overall picture. The person did have an OSM background but it > seems no OAuth knowledge. > > I would expect many more problems of that caliber to show up if we let > people without OSM exposure translate stuff. It may just about work for the > web site (but even there I'm skeptical) but not for a sophisticated editor. Most of the strings in the website are translatable without context by someone not familiar with OSM. For every technical osm-specific error message there are 10 nominatim strings, or some general message anyone can translate. Also, translators *love* having context strings. Most of the string in Potlatch on Translatewiki have context strings, and our translations are a lot better for it (see http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Bug-Report-Address for the general idea). > In my eyes, a *bad* (or half-good) translation is worse than no translation > at all. If members of the JOSM or at least OSM community do not have the > time to translate JOSM into Ancient Greek then I'd prefer not to have an > Ancient Greek JOSM at all, rather than having an Ancient Greek JOSM which > has been translated by Ancient Greek enthusiast who knew nothing of OSM. I have to completely disagree there. Most people don't understand English at the technical level required to make sense of a program like JOSM. These are the people that benefit the most from translated programs. Personally I just use everything in English even though I've contributed a lot to translation infrastructure. Having a bad translation v.s. no translation can be the difference between being able to use the program and not using it at all. Imagine using a UI in Klingon v.s. one in very bad machine translated Engrish. It'd have to be pretty bad to not be more understandable than the original. > Unfortunately the statistics capture quantity, not quality. Yeah, and neither of us has the language skills nor the time to do a good review of Launchpad v.s. Translatewiki in this respect, so this discussion is doomed to remain forever hypothetical. I have a lot of confidence in the work of people that do things for free because they're passionate about it. There's a lot of translation geeks on both Translatewiki and Launchpad, generally they do a very good job of translating unfamiliar programs given the constraints. _______________________________________________ josm-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
