Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Follow-up on en_US changes

Hi :)
I think most translations are NOT word-for-word so i suspect that you all
tend to smooth over 'rough' patches.  Plus there are a couple of people who
joined this mailing list specifically to help with occasional issues or to
try to help re-explain bits where a concept might not exist in a specific
other language.

A couple years ago there was a few of weeks where there were daily reports
of problems with the English 'original'.  So that was when a couple of
people joined this list to help.  At the moment that resource is being a
little underutilized, which is ideal.


Ideally the Documentation Team would have a system for proof-reading all
the UX, Wiki, websites, announcements and the in-built help.  Sadly they
have always been a very tiny team and most of them don't seem to be able to
cope with almost any of the technical stuff that translators routinely deal
with.  So they tend to focus on the Published Guides which use more
traditional work-flows and even that is a bit overwhelming.

Even if they did have the capacity to deal with all the things they would
like to do there would still be individual issues.  I'm fairly sure that
every language has some concepts that are not so easy to express in other
languages.  So i think we would still need a couple of people to answer
questions about oddities like that.


The people who DO work hard to proof-read and update all the rest
(everything other than the published guides) also tend to be very tiny
teams, over-worked and often seem to be non-native English-speakers.  That
is sometimes an advantage, because they tend to know the rules better, but
sometimes makes it tougher to make things smooth.


So, i think we are doing the best we reasonably can - and that we have made
the best use of limited resources.  It's not perfect but what is?

Regards from
Tom :)



On 4 December 2014 at 07:18, Rimas Kudelis <rq@akl.lt> wrote:

> IMO bad quality of English strings can be improved by having some l10m
> teams work on Master (and spotting these bad strings early enough), and
> that is being discussed in parallel.
>
> Also, perhaps requiring string reviews on patches with new or changed
> strings could be an option. I'm pretty sure we could find someone to gladly
> do these reviews within the community. :-)
>
> Rimas
>
> On 2014 m. gruodis 4 d. 08:06:12 EET, Yury Tarasievich <
> yury.tarasievich@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I may be completely misunderstanding this, but
> > it seems to me the point is the en_US strings
> > should be translations as well. That would put
> > much needed damper on the changes introduced
> > "just because they can be introduced". As a
> > secondary gain, translations are (hopefully)
> > created by folks with at least some native
> > language preparation; right now "master" strings
> > "which anybody can write" -- as I know from my
> > own practice and from this list -- may be
> > awkward in expression and/or convoluted in
> > meaning (fixing which creates more work for
> > everybody).
> >
> > Yury
> >
> > On 12/04/2014 02:58 AM, Jesper Hertel wrote:
> > > 2014-12-01 14:57 GMT+01:00 Sophie <gautier.sophie@gmail.com>:
> > ...
> > > > Some changes are necessary and the en_US version has to be
> > maintained
> > > > too but that shouldn't have an impact or at least, as limited as
> > > > possible on the l10n work.
> > > I do believe discussing the English strings are somewhat related to
> > the
> > > translation of them, so maybe because of that I fail to see a very
> > sharp
> > > division between them and the localization. The English strings are,
> > in
> > > principle, also a type of localization, I would say. They just have a
> > much
> > > higher authority, as they become the authoritative source for the
> > rest of
> > > the localizations.
> > ...
> >
> > Yury
> >
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> --
> Rimas
>
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