"Aleksey Bragin" aleksey@studiocerebral.com wrote:
Translation can be roughly divided into 3 parts:
- www.reactos.com website, it should become multilanguage
- ReactOS Documentation (it's part of www.reactos.com website, but it goes
into another category) 3. ReactOS itself (all text, strings, dialogs, applications, etc). It should be discussed and people should agree on the prefereable way to do this.
Hi,
I'd like to start with "light-weighted" matters;)
First, why don't you use ROS-wiki to list people who are willing to translate? It supports the table-layout and much smart than posting the HTML mails when there're changes, IMHO.
Next, I'm still willing to take the translation roll on Japanese.
And.. it might be too long to read, boring, redundant, and so on;but at least Aleksey, please read the rest of this mail, it's a very important thing to discuss.
I read the discussion on translation on this list and thought that almost the same problem as other OSS have'll happen on ROS translation, too. IMO, you can handle those languages which have many translators easily(in this case, German, Dutch, and some other western languages). If there're strange translations, they are easy to be found and fixed. When there's a argument about translation, it's also solved easily; you can vote or do anything you like. But on the languages which have few translators, the circumstances'll be definitively different. Before arguing about this, I want to make the point clear; do you guys think that those terrible translations on some OSS(e.g.Linux, some guys mentioned) are done on purpose? Do you guys think the translators on those projects are nothing but fools? You can always do much better than them? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Those translators try to translate as far as they can, but they fail to make good translations because of miss, lacking of experience, etc... So, those who noticed that the translations are mess, they are (at least partially) potentially better translators than the main-translator who're working on the projects. But why those "messy" translations are left as they are? In most cases I think, it's because those users don't report the matter but just complain:"the translation is a mess!!!". Hmm, what's lines the claimers and the testers? I believe it's whether they report what they found and or propose the solutions or not. Yeah, it's a quite important problem. There're more and more potential testers all over the world but most of the software vendors(not only the OSS, but also the proprietary vendors I think) are just cutting them off and categorize they are "claimers". What a wasteful loss! Anyway, I think you guys agree on the point that if there are more contributers, things turn to better states. Of course, I don't mean that the state that everyone have unlimited access on CVS is great. It's clear that it'll cause a catastrophe. No review, no rule, no order, no peace:) Well, obeying the opensource bazzar model, it's quite natural to try on taking the so-called "claimers" into the project as "testers" and/or "reviewers". So I propose the above(about the ROS iself): why don't you put a "bug/translation report" button next to the minimize/maximize button on all dialogs/windows shown on ROS for a "tester edition" or something? I'm not sure but I think some Unix' window manager have this feature to have more feedbacks. On production release, there'll be many users who doesn't like the strange buttons are shown on their windows, so it'd be stripped away from the production release(the future release for practical use, I mean). * Clicking the button'll show the dialog to report bug/translation feedback which has a form consisted of the user's name and comment box to fill in. * Fill in the forms and click "feedback" to send the app-path, window name, and the comments to the server. /* Note: we should apply the forms which are completely blank, because the translation matters are mostly caused by lacking of translators' awareness, because there're massive amount of strings/documents. The numbers of fully-blanked forms'll be great help for translators to indicate the problems. It doesn't tell nothing, but DOES tell there're odd points on the dialogs/windows. */ * Then translators view the feedbacks and decide what to do.
I think most of you should've noticed; this "feature" requires at least tweak on dialog API and support for TCP/IP, but it's worth implementing (tho I can't take the implementation roll).
I'm not writing this massive messy unrecognizable English mail because I've accidentally had this idea, but I've seen the terrible state of softwares/OS's and thought how to make them better over times. For instance, KDE stripped away the Japanese locale from their release because it was lacking of quality and quantity, in spite of they have great system to coodinate translations. (Well, it's partially solved problem now, as the tragic state became a article on slashdot-jp and eventually many people noticed the problem, proposed to help them.) Then, it's clear that the same problem'll happen on ReactOS. I'm almost sure. So we should expand the bazzar model to user-land. It'll cause a few problems but the benefits are countless.
It's still a "draft idea", there might be some issues I'm not awared of.
But I'd like to repeat; remember, many users complain the terrible quality of translation but curerntly, most of them just complain, overlook, and spread bad image of those softwares, but don't report and try to make them better. It'll be a great help if we can take them into the project as testers.
Any comments are appreciated.
Regards, and thanks for reading,
Masahiro.