Re: Ensuring Translation Quality

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 2:52 PM, F Wolff <friedel@translate.org.za> wrote:
>
>
> Op Vr, 2011-09-23 om 11:06 +0700 skryf Urmas:
>> 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.
>
> To my best knowledge incomplete localisations are released and welcomed
> in at least GNOME where I am active. I was recently involved in an
> effort to make it easier to make (better) incomplete localisations of
> GNOME, so I am reasonably confident that it is the case:
> http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/better-lies-about-gnome-localisation
>
> I also feel that we can make reasonable arguments for releasing
> incomplete localisations, as we have seen in this thread so far.
>
>
>> 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.
>
> Depending on your definition of "abandoned" they might be. The truth is
> that the world of FOSS is huge, and many of us are part of small groups
> trying to localise as much of the FOSS software as our time allows. That
> means some projects only receive attention on a few occasions rather
> than daily/weekly or even monthly. Depending on the amount of change in
> the source text of the software, it might or might not make a big
> difference in how users experience the incomplete translations.
>
>
>> >> 2) Remove Esperanto [eo] translation entirely due to its low
>> quality, and considering the fact that Esperanto is toy, artificial
>> language, and quality translation can not be assured without
>> contributors' voluntarism.
>> >
>> > ...All the languages came from humans. So did
>> > Esperanto. Calling Esperanto a toy language is an offense.
>>
>> From _people_, not from ophtalmologists of XIX century. I understand
>> that a little part of several thousands of humankind is fond of
>> conlangs, and delights playing with funny letters and other puerile
>> stuff, but translations are to be made by people actually knowing the
>> language. Quenya, Esperanto, Interlingua, Na'vi or Klingon have no
>> native speakers, so translations can only be done in the form of
>> vision each translator have on that conlang, without any guidance
>> possible.
>
> I also sometimes like to make jokes about Esperanto, but I don't know if
> you meant this as a joke. As far as I know, Esperanto grammar is quite
> well established, and there are native speakers, like George Soros,
> who's Open Society Institute has been very kind to several FOSS projects
> and groups.
>
> In fact, my own language, Afrikaans, was only formally described in the
> twentieth century, compared to the first Esperanto grammar book from
> 1887 (according to Wikipedia, anyway).
>
>
>> Because we should avoid translations made by non-natives as we cannot
>> judge their veritability, machine translations and translations into
>> conlangs are not acceptable.
>
> I think you already have a problem: you have no idea which of the
> current translations were done by native speakers or with the help of
> machine translation. I don't know what the process is for writing source
> text, but we might have an even greater problem: some of the English
> source text might have been written by non-native speakers of English.
>
> So either we introduce an acceptance test (won't happen, right?) or we
> rather try to focus on aspects of quality that are easier to
> measure/fix. Tools like pofilter and poconflicts might provide a
> starting point. Doing something like adding comments to some ambiguous
> strings in the English text might help to avoid translation mistakes.
>
>
>> > The localization of Esperanto is of very high quality...
>>
>> It is not. It is full of inconsistencies which are result of the
>> language situation described above.

That's just your personal opinion. :)
Keith, as the major contributor to the Esperanto localization, do you
see any validity in the complain of Urmas, regarding the localization
of Esperanto?

Regards,
Pradeeban.
>
> I haven't looked at the translation at all. If it is indeed of low
> quality, I would propose that it is addressed like we do with any bug or
> other shortcoming in the software: through a friendly request to the
> previous translators, or in their absence, maybe reaching out to other
> related communities where we can maybe find interested people. Maybe the
> Esperanto group at GNOME would be interested, for example.
>
> If speakers of Esperanto can confirm that it is indeed harmful to the
> project and we can't improve it, then removing it from the build might
> be the appropriate thing to do.
>
> Keep well
> Friedel
>
> --
> Recently on my blog:
> http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/virtaal-070-released
>
>

-- 
Kathiravelu Pradeeban.
Software Engineer.
WSO2 Inc.
Blog: [Llovizna] http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/