Re: Ensuring Translation Quality

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 12:06 AM, Urmas <davian818@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Kathiravelu Pradeeban" <kk.pradeeban@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Ensuring Translation Quality
>
>>> 1) Remove .strings files for languages with translation less then 90% complete. We should preserve po-files in case somebody will want to improve them, obviously.
>>
>> That doesn't make any sense to do so. Many words are not translated
>> yet to the local languages. So we need time...
>
> They have more than enough time to update them. In fact, we have a handful of people who care to update their translation, but other do not. The maintanability and reasonable completeness is mandatory in other community projects like Gnome or KDE. The undeniable fact is that most translations are abandoned, have a little hope that someone will take interest in them again, and should not be included as their quality hurts Abiword image.

Urmas, I can only say that I am glad that you do not speak for the
majority of the AbiWord community.

Speaking as the i18n/L10n lead for Sugar Labs / OLPC, you do not seem
to understand that failing to include the partially complete
translations (none of them below 50%) merely because they do not meet
a purely arbitrary cut-off point would cause far greater damage to
AbiWord's reputation with one of it's major distributors (full AbiWord
is shipped in OLPC builds intended for about two million XO laptops).

Making such an arbitrary choice might also be perceived as a breach of
good faith in a longstanding, highly productive and mutually
beneficial collaboration that has recently seen Sugar Labs / OLPC
expend considerable effort to provide additional localization tools
and enhanced access to a larger localization community through the
Pootle hosting arrangement.

Holding AbiWord to the standards adopted by large Linux operating
system user interface projects with significant corporate support and
using them as a comparison for an independent word processing
application is both arbitrary and absurd. The percent coverage
cut-off you've selected is even stricter than the standards that
"official" Oracle builds of Open Office employ.

You seem to have completely ignored the actual data that I provided in
my earlier message in favor of arguing a hypothetical point. You are
proposing a bad solution that is in search of a problem that does not
exist, and doing it in a way that shows great disrespect for the
efforts of the localizers when you should instead be treating them as
full stakeholders in the AbiWord project.

Do you really not understand that AbiWord can add far more users to
it's user base by adding a few new languages than it can by adding a
few new features?

cjl
Received on Fri Sep 23 08:18:47 2011