[RkWard-devel] plug-ins & translation

[SJR]

Am Dienstag, 16. Januar 2007 17:55 schrieb I. Soumpasis:
> Do you believe that a translation of the plugins is necessary? I mean that
> most of the words used in the plugins are not translatable (for example, I
> can not translate boxplot and spearman etc, ant not even write them in
> Greek) or the user should get a hard time to understand them (for example
> if I translate Density it would give a hard time to the user to connect the
> greek word with English density). So if we translate only few words in a
> plugin because some could be translated and some not, could be a mess for
> uniformity, with half in one language and some in another. Any experienced
> users in statistics would probably have more problems than the ones solved.
>

I understand your point of view but unfortunately I don't consent here. When I 
use RKWard I usually try to see what an average user might need. And at least 
I think many users will appreciate the software in their native language(some 
wont). Of course there are many words which can't be translated or even need 
to be translated. The examples you gave for boxplot or spearman apply since 
they are proper names. But that doesn't work well for density. In German 
it's "Dichte" and for example density function would be "Dichtefunktion" 
which can be commanly found in text books. "Mean" or let it be "Average".  
But preferable for the German Language is "Mittelwert". There are many more 
examples like this. I think many users "can" become confused in case of less 
experience or if they only occasionally users.
But of course there is no need to translate everything.

> Unfortunately, I searched both minitab and SPSS to see how they treat this
> but both copies I have are en English. Is in other languages everything
> translated? Since it seems difficult to be implemented does it worth?

If with reasonable afford a solution is possible one should try to achieve 
one. But this is my personal opinion. The coding must be done by Thomas or 
who ever is capebale at the end.

>
> Another view could be to translate the help pages so the new user could
> read what something could mean if he doesn't understand it. Help pages
> should be translated either way because it doesn't seem nice to have a
> plugin interface translated and a help page untranslated.
>

I also like Help pages but (to my personal experience) user tend to fiddle 
around instead of reading the help. Therefore I prefere an translated GUI at 
first. Preferable is to translate both of course. But right now we leaking 
man power I think.

> This is a very personal opinion knowing only the greek side of the problem,
> and for sure does not apply to all translations. But I believe that it
> would be a problem of uniformity with languages not using the latin
> alphabet in translating plugins.

True. This is something far beyond my knowledge.

>
> Regards
> Ilias

Kind regards
Stefan