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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Improving KDE with translators
From:       Vedran =?utf-8?q?Ljubovi=C4=87?= <vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba>
Date:       2004-08-28 18:38:04
Message-ID: 200408282038.04072.vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba
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On Friday 27 August 2004 22:51, Gérard Delafond wrote:
> > > because I can never dream to secure more then 2 stars by myself and I
> > > can't find anyone to help me?
>
> What is the problem ? 

The problem is that our language has some 2 milion speakers, of which 
officially only 5% uses a computer so it's absolutely not realistic to expect 
to create a team to translate the docs.

> Nobody is supposed to translate everything. People do 
> only what they want and what they can.
> Simply, it would be more responsible if the users would know what quality
> they can expect.

Personally I'm confident that our translation is top-notch quality:
We're continuously a part of the KDE distribution for almost 3 years now. We 
have a glossary and a styleguide. The translations were revised *several* 
times by third party. We have a wiki in place for reporting problematic 
translations and a mailing list. In the past year the number of user comments 
has decreased and most of them are compliments.

So I think it's not fair to use some arbitrary criteria that would e.g. give 
us a poor rating just because:
- we don't translate kdenonbeta cause it's a waste of time
- we don't translate KOffice cause we use and promote OpenOffice.org
- we don't translate KDevelop cause a developer is supposed to know English 
and half the terms would be impossible to translate anyway
- we don't translate the KDE docs cause it's such an enormous task - and 
unfinished work is by my definition poorly done; instead we write our own, 
trimmed down, task-oriented docs
- I personally think that if there is e.g. a button that says "Hello world" 
it's much more intuitive to activate it by pressing Alt+H twice then to press 
Alt+D just because all the other keys were taken
- we leave taking screenshots as "junior jobs" (and a side-effect is that this 
job is not done yet)
- we're technically a two person team - though if you look at the names in PO 
file headers I'm sure you'll find 30-40 unique names

Look, I know what is TQM and I know what you're trying to do. But you can't 
really judge a translation unless you know the language and know the way a 
team functions, whether they have a glossary etc. The only way KDE could deal 
with this is to ask the translators themselves. We already have criteria in 
place, and that is:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/KDE_3_3_BRANCH/essential.php
And that's all we need for now, IMHO.


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