On Sun, 2 Oct 2011, Frederik Ramm wrote:
With JOSM continuously gaining more features, maintaining full translations,
especially those spoken only by a small group of mappers or worse, only by
translators who are not even familiar with mapping, becomes harder.
When there is not a single change in translation for months then degradion
of quality is to be expected. The languages I mentioned have not even been
near 100% in their best days in the past.
For this reason - but not for this reason alone - I would love to see
something like a "JOSM light", a version of JOSM that brings the benefits of
a stable, standalone, offline-capable editor without tons and tons of extra
features.
I know I know, but I don't think this will happen :-) But we plan an
expert/novice mode to make it easier for beginners.
I have no idea how this should be achieved. One way would certainly be to
reverse course and put more stuff back into plugins - possibly improving the
plugin architecture along the way. Trying to fork off a JOSM light would also
be an option.
I don't see any features of core which aren't really important parts and
could be stripped. Maybe some of the tools functions could, but this would
neither change software size nor translation count in a noticeable way.
This would enable us to have an almost fully translated "JOSM light" that
beginner users could use without having to fear the occasional un-translated
English message.
From my experiences with other software developed in the past I know, that
the amount of texts is not really relevant for the fact whether a
translation is complete or not. More important is if a person feels
responsible or not.
That texts change is normal part of software development. I rather have a
partially untranslated JOSM than an unchanging one, as that would mean the
software is dead.
The original mail is mainly a trial to find someone responsible for the
abondoned languages. Other projects are much more strict when dropping
languages (they have limits like 90%, not 20%).
At the same time, there would be clear priorities for translators - translate
the JOSM light messages first, then progress to the more complex things
needed for the full feature set. At the moment, a translator would not know
if "You moved more than {0} elements." is more or less important to translate
than "Please launch the preferences dialog and retrieve another OAuth token."
...
In Launchpad the texts are already ordered in the order of importance:
First core strings, then presets and additional texts, then plugins.
Even if we fail to make a proper "JOSM light", that last issue - knowing
which texts are part of everyday mapping and which aren't - is something that
we could investigate. Would it, for example, be possible to use different
translation wrappers in the code - e.g. tr1(), tr2(), tr3() instead of only
tr() - to denote importance?
Hardly. While this is possible in general it wont work. I.e. error texts
are usually never visible, but when they are, you need to understand them
or you are totally lost. Most of the strings in the software are thus
strings, which are seldom or never shown, but when they are they are
important.
What is possible already today is to add a comment in front of tr(),
giving hints to the translators. I usually add I18N as keyword in the
text, like this: /* I18N: Don't translate the text in brackets */
Currently we have approx. 50 to 150 strings per release, which means a
workload of 5 strings a day. If a translator uses 5 hours each month, he
could probably translate about 300-500 strings and a year later one of the
bad languages could reach 100%. For Chinese I have seen that JOSM complete
can be done in two days.
Ciao
--
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)
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