This is a nice letter. I have to admit I got a little upset when I found myself
doing several hours of translation on kspread most of which I had also done
earlier. But if kspread is as good as I hope when it comes out with kde2, then
it does not matter.

It might occasionally be a good idea to have a msgstr in a po-file saying DON'T
TRANSLATE YET

That would not be very difficult I think.

Erik Kjær Pedersen

Den Wed, 27 Sep 2000 skrev Sebastià Pla i Sanz:
> Hi all,
> 
> This story has happened to me this morning. I've seen a guy in my company (I 
> work for a software & services firm in Barcelona) using KDE 1.2 in catalan.
> 
> me: Hey !, you are using KDE, what do you think of this?
> him: Great !! I like it much more than Gnome...
> me: Do you know that I've done most of the catalan translation?
> him: Really? It's very well done !
> 
> I nearly broke into tears ;-). I'm sharing this story with you just to 
> reassure everybody of the importance of what we are doing. Without the coders 
> we would have nothing to translate. But one of the keys of KDE's success is the 
> attention paid to i18n. All the work by Coolo, Juraj, Thomas and the rest, the 
> i18n web site, the CVS, the scripts, the daily snapshots, KBabel and 
> KTranslator, all this infrastructure is of a quality that surpasses that of a 
> lot of commercial projects. This, and our work makes possible that a lot of 
> people that doesn't know English can benefit from a quality desktop.
> 
> Being a programmer myself, when I joined the KDE effort, I would have 
> preferred to help the coding bunch, but I thought that my work would be more 
> necessary in the translation to catalan. (If not you, then nobody, said 
> Stephan). I think this is still the case and try to remember it when revising 
> for the umptenth time the same file, just to discover that the messages that I 
> translated three days ago are now obsolete...
> 
> I know that Thomas and Stephan are trying to convey our problems to the 
> developers. If just we knew wich files are more likely to change, we would be 
> able not to waste so much effort and not to discourage the newcomers.
> 
> Well, I apologise for such a long message. I just thought that sharing my 
> feelings would be useful in those days of KSpread fuzzyness...
> 
> Sebastià.
> -- 
> Encara quedem valencians que no volem deixar d'ésser el poble que som,
> que no volem cedir a la dissolució ni a la indiferència.
> 		   Joan Fuster. "Nosaltres, els valencians"