Fwd: Re: Translating of jokes in programs.

[Chris Howells]

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IMHO this should be added to the style guide...

Comments?

- ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Translating of jokes in programs.
Date: Sunday 28 April 2002 8:31 am
From: Claudiu Costin <claudiuc at kde.org>
To: kde-i18n-doc at mail.kde.org

   Dear friends,
  IMO promoting and allowing jokes on KDE project
managed packages is unprofessional. Let's face it.
Smileys, jokes and english word expressions/combinations
(which don't have i18n & cultural equivalent) are
bad thinks.
  Smileys - these make your program look like a toy even
is very powefull and a serious thing.
  Jokes - There's nothing bad like jokes. As programmer and
sysadmin I like _some_ jokes found in _some_ programs, but
when it come that a nice graphical application is used
by Joe Average and very possible with a MS Windows background,
then jokes just make _some_ KDE apps look dumb. These things
are not fiction, but crude reality.
 English word games - altough for english speakes these are
nice and relaxant, looking from i18n and cultural point of view
are almost untranslatable (pointed past few mails ago).
  Function names - Still are i18n messages which contain function
names in their error messages. How we supose users will get feedback
on these "foobar() method was making bla bla..."? Was pointed some
months ago on kde-devel that an error code and _short_ descriptive
message can be good for unusual and unexpected error messages. That
ways tons of i18n-fied error messages repeating again and again will
strip down the growing number of PO messages.


- -- 
Cheers, Chris Howells -- chris at chrishowells.co.uk, howells at kde.org
Web: http://chrishowells.co.uk, PGP key: http://chrishowells.co.uk/pgp.txt
KDE: http://www.koffice.org, http://edu.kde.org, http://usability.kde.org

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