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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: KGeography needs your help
From:       Chusslove Illich <caslav.ilic () gmx ! net>
Date:       2005-08-10 3:49:36
Message-ID: 200508100549.39509.caslav.ilic () gmx ! net
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> [: Gregory Mokhin :]
> Thanks to Chusslove for his ongoing effort to provide scripting for
> highly inflective languages.

Thank you and the others for taking interest :)

> Just to make it clear: what Stephan Kulow tried to emphasize is very
> true. Often problems of inflections are minor compared to other
> issues.

I don't even mean to imply that language-specific problems that we have in 
our translations are nearly as important as many other issues. Quite the 
contrary.

But, I am currently not working on those other issues. I am here, now, 
engaged in the translation, having my cases broken, and not liking it :) I 
mean, I am trying my best at what I am doing, taking care in process to 
not disturb others (like, "could you please add another few hundred 
messages to that PO, my language needs them"; I don't mean to say this is 
rude, but if I can avoid it...)

> Not a single time a received any complaint that here or there an
> inflection is wrong or a plural is missing. It seems if users are able
> to understand the translation, then they are also ready to accept some
> rough edges.

I find this, "user don't complain about it", to be a tricky lightpost. I 
frequently find myself live with something thinking it's not big deal, 
than get to better, and than think a lot worse of the previous state :) 
And I find this not effect to be limited to myself only.

Imagine that in books every thousandth letter is broken, and printers 
saying it must be that way, because there are more serious things to 
solve. I don't think we'd object too much. But once we got used to much 
higher level of correctness, we'll be thinking pretty bad about a book 
that has every thousandth letter wrong.

In particular, I think of one so-so known OS, where currently they don't 
get even basic plurals right. To me now, it looks blody stupid, but I 
don't here many (or rather, any) users of that OS complaining about that.

What I do here frequently, however, are Serbian users (especially computer 
savvy) pointing out that using software in Serbian language is ugly, and 
sometimes the argument comes to the grammar inconsistencies we are having. 
These guys are scaring out user less determined in this matter, and I 
don't like to provide any ammo...

> [...] for a big project (like KDE certainly is) it is impossible to
> properly test all localized strings - there are just too many strings
> and strings themselves change too fast. And there are other bugs in the
> software that are more important.

I have said before, but let me just recall. There are two important aspects 
to scripting: they are needed rarely, but at highly visible places. My 
"About %1" are broken, my "Configure %1" are broken, my "Handbook for %1" 
are broken, my "Open with %1" are broken, my plurals are ugly ("0 files 
found" instead of "no files found"), my "Show %1" and "Hide %1" are 
broken. Thus, scripting comes highly rewarding.

> Therefore I support very much Krzysztof's idea: the realization should
> be as simple and intuitive as possible. Very simple (pseudo)-language,
> or maybe even language-dependent libs for inflections of nouns and
> adjectives, that can be formalized for a few language-specific rules
> (hopefully even for Estonian), instead of repeating same forms for all
> words in po files. This will diminish the number of bugs to almost
> unnoticeable level and save time of our translators.

I am not outright against our own custom language, but getting it to be 
easier than some well known one, is not something that I would bet is 
feasible. Also, I am afraid that it might require constant tweaking as it 
goes, and that is a promise for a mess.

Currently, I consider this custom stuff to be a serious option primarely 
due to overheads and security.

-- 
Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)
Serbian KDE translation team

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