amarok 1.4.7 - string freeze

[Mashrab Kuvatov]

Hi,

On Saturday 04 August 2007 14:42, Harald Sitter wrote:

> We also tought about making the UI more consistent in matters of
> translation. In fact we are considering to remove translations which are
> lower than average.

I hope you reconsider it and continue to package all available translations of 
the Amarok. Hopefully, at least, you provide those translations which are 
officially shipped with the KDE (the others will not work without kdelibs and 
Co. translations anyway).

It is impossible to estimate and judge if the particular translation is 
usable, unless one speaks that language. For example, the Uzbek translation 
of the Amarok is at ~50%. The Amarok is perfectly usable in Uzbek, I know 
many Uzbek speaking users have no problem with it and like it very much. 
According your definitions 50% of translation is not enough and the Uzbek 
translation needs to be removed. However, in the limit you set you do not 
take into account how many messages user most probable will see are 
translated. For example, there are quite a lot of messages of the helix, 
yauap, etc. engines which are barely used by our taget users (Uzbek users). 
We do not translate those messages, since first we do not have enough 
manpower, and second it is very unlikely that our users will see those 
messages. There are quite a lot of error messages which are very technical 
and there is no understandable Uzbek translation for them. Therefore, we 
leave them in English to so at least the users with enough technical skills 
could understand what is going on. I could continue with other such examples. 
The point is that although for you it seems that the translation is not good 
enough, it can be so for the native speakers.

You (please do not take it personal) approached the problem from the point of 
view of the person to whom having computer, Internet, Linux, compiling from 
sources, etc. are normal. Unfortunately, for us people from the 
third/developing/you name it world it is not so. We have to struggle much 
more to get our work (localization) to the user. At the moment, our work 
reaches the users only through the Linux distros. So, if you remove the Uzbek 
translations, distros will not package it, and our users will not get it.

Moreover, if the application is not fully translated, it can be a starting 
point for someone who wants to contribute. So, like I said, please reconsider 
your decision, and continue distributing all existing translations.

Mashrab.

-- 
Mashrab Kuvatov
PGP key: www.uni-bremen.de/~kmashrab/kmashrab.asc
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