Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Really 2,609 new strings?

On Tue, Jun 9, 2026 at 11:34 PM Martin Srebotnjak <miles@filmsi.net> wrote:
> Well, this is a well known practice from libreoffice help maintainers - to
> drop a ton of changes a week or a few weeks before a string freeze.

Well, that's not really the same thing as with this one, and just
course of action, you can only know what is final once stuff reaches a
freeze phase, and manpower for writing help also is limited. If you
want the documents in help project earlier, the best way is to
contribute those yourself early.

> LO is translate in about 120+ languages.
>
> Changing so many strings means a lot of work. Since TDF has a lot of
> accumulated funds, it is time they share these funds with the localization
> teams that have a few weeks to translate so many strings. Whom should I
> send my banking info to?

Please remember that despite TDF having a handful people employed, it
is mostly a volunteer driven project, and it is always easy to
criticize stuff that is not optimal. But that's why we have a string
freeze to begin with, to have at least a full month for translators to
deal with the strings before the .0 release, and realistically then
another 3-4 months before people from the old branch are cross-updated
to the new version.

Unless developers start writing documentation immediately when they
commit something, you'll never be able to avoid late string changes.
(And I don't think you want help/documentation written by developers,
you'd only change early string changes by lots of revisions to make it
"readable"/understandable for the end-user, and having lots of string
changes and having to touch up a string multiple times is arguably
worse than only having to translate once, even if the string comes
late).

And if you read old ESC minutes, Olivier/Documentation team has always
"begged" developers to add stuff to the releasenotes, to write
abstracts of their new features so the documentation team can write
the help pages early. But everyone's time is limited.

And you also don't want to just not add documentation to new features
just to avoid translation work, just no longer writing documentation
is the easiest way to not have new strings to work on, but that is
even worse than terse developer-lingo ;-)

ciao
Christian

PS: to fix the current patch of busy-work strings it in your sl files
you can replace 'SC_OPCODE_' with 'oc' in the msgctxt prefix of
sc/messages.po in obsolete strings or old version of the file and run
the update against the current templates

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