[libreoffice-l10n] On strings with errors and people trying to fix them

(Disclaimer: own opinion, I don’t speak for the project, blah blah blah)

Hi all,

I feel that I need to bring this up in order to have some perspective.

As you know, the LibreOffice project is developed by a huge extent by
people whose native language is not English. (But even if most of our
developers were native English speakers, they are human too—so this is not
a crucial factor. I know this because I teach English and have studied some
linguistics at uni.)
People will make mistakes sometimes in their language. It’s normal and
ACCEPTABLE. We do not want to crucify anyone for not uttering perfect
sentences all the time. I, for one, am very prone to accidental errors—even
in my first language! And even with my TOEFL pBT score of 663, I write or
say things that are not quite right, from time to time.

The project needs to be able to fix those errors (which include spacing and
capitalization, as well as typos and terminology). We NEED people fixing
translatable strings for those errors. We need NOT to berate them for
causing us extra work in Pootle.

I also volunteer as a localizer for Wikimedia. Their strings change every
single day. mozilla-central (equivalent to our “master” branch) is also
changing rapidly, and even more so today because they’re in the process of
revamping their i18n technology. Software changes!

I believe that nobody at LibreOffice is intentionally trying to make
anyone’s life harder.

This needed to be said.

Adolfo
A volunteer translator that is happy to retranslate a string which had a
typo.

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