Nicole Dijkstra wrote:
Following a mail from Natalie there is something I would like to clarify. In row 6 of the review pages it says who did the translation, and this often says Alpha. This suggests we did whole pages, which was very often not the case. The
I think this was caused by the instructions for using the sheets which were published by Bert ( http://nl.openoffice.org/localization/uitleg_review.odt ). These show that in row 6 the Translator should be set to "Alpha CRC", except for the texts from 'Writer'.
files we were given to translate contained new/changed sentences and paragraphs from here, there, and everywhere. When the Help was compiled these were inserted in their respective places in a previous translation. So pages look like they were translated by Alpha, whereas in fact we only did several sentences or paragraphs on those pages. (Which is not to say, there are no changes required in those sentences/paragraphs.)
At first we were told that the help texts for Writer would be translated by "the community" and the rest by Alpha. After that the entire help would be reviewed by "the community" to get the final glitches out.
After some e-mail contact between Sun and the community it became clear that only part of the texts were sent to Alpha (and I believe that we also only received part of the Writer help texts to translate). These translations were somehow merged with the existing help from version 1.1.x
I believe that all judgements about the quality of the translation were made while believing that Alpha translated the entire help (except for Writer). I think that we can leave that situation behind. Maybe 'forget and forgive' would be a good starting point so we can continue working on a practical solution for the translation of the help. The solution proposed earlier (re-reviews by Natalie go to Alpha, along with the entire help; frequently found errors are fixed globally; changes from the re-reviews are incorporated and the new help files are used for the rest of the reviewing) was accepted by us all if I remember it correctly.
I think that both the community, Alpha and Sun want a Dutch version of OOo2 with a very good Dutch help. Who translated/fixed what is less important than the quality of the end result. And as far as blaming anyone for a bad job done goes, I personally think that that is only a matter between Sun and Alpha; they are the only parties in a possible contract about the translation.
A few remarks about the way I (and possibly many others) feel about the importance of a good quality of the translation: quite a few Dutch versions of software are poorly translated; most Dutch users get irritated by bad translations because they don't understand the text anymore and feel that the quality of the texts reflects the overall quality of the software. Since a lot of us recommend OOo to others we want to make sure that OOo makes a good impression.
Okay, enough ranting for today ;-) Regards, Jigal.
