2010/7/25 John Bailey <[email protected]>: > On 07/25/2010 08:32 AM, David Woolley wrote: >> Then submit enough translations of the text in the installer to push it >> above 50%. > > David is correct--if you translate more than half of the Windows Installer > strings in your .po file, then the language will be an available option in the > installer language selector. Selecting a language there will cause Pidgin to > run in the selected language.
Quite sincerely, this new policy is IMHO quite absurd. Even though the nsis installer text might not be fully translated the overall PO statistics for Spanish were quite high (IIRC over a 90% update ratio). Which means the program *was* translated almost fully even if the installer strings were not. The Pidgin team should have been more careful when implementing the policy and should have warned the translation teams that the languages were going to be disabled *before* disabling them. I know of similar policies (for example, we implement them in the Debian GNU/Linux Installer) and 1) they are based on the overall status of the PO file, not a subset of it 2) translators *and* translator teams are forewarned (directly, not through a mailing list) before any language is disabled in order to give them the oportunity to react >> It is unlikely to be an error, but much more likely to be the policy >> that the translations be at least 50% complete. > > The 50% requirement is imposed by the perl script we use to extract installer > strings from the .po files. We could trivially change this, but in my > opinion, > forcing translators to translate enough to create an installer that's actually > useful in a given language is a good thing. Again. This policy is not a good idea. If a policy was set it should be based on the overall translation status of the program, not of the installer itself. The fact is: users cannot easily install the 'language' component and enable it through the GUI, they have to go through some hoops and find the FAQ (which is not installed with the program itself) and find out that in order to enable the translation they have to install the component and change the registry. It also generates an inconsistent behaviour of Pidgin between Linux and Windows users:users of Linux distributions get all the languages and will "see" those thy set their locale to, Windows users will only "see" the one the Installation systems provides them with. Moreover, the behaviour is inconsistent with *new* Windows users and wilth *old* users: those users that 'upgrade' Pidgin from versions previous to 2.7.1 will see their *old* setting. I'm not a Windows users myself, and the few times I use Pidgin in Windows I upgrade the client (which explains why I hadn't seen this issue). In the Spanish case, this policy results in not providing a translation that is actually quite complete for the *program* which results in less Spanish-speaking users using the program itself and, in the long term, means less userbase for Pidgin. In the long term, this is actually bad for Pidgin. Finally, just a remark: I would have expect a direct (personal not mailing list) e-mail to forewarn me of this, specially consideing that Spanish is one of the most used/spoken languages in the world and Pidgin has a Spanish translator that has been updating the PO translation for over 8 years. Regards Javier _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list Want to unsubscribe? Use this link: http://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support
