What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Thomas Spura]

Am Dienstag, den 09.12.2008, 01:25 +0100 schrieb Robert Scheck:
> Our German translation is only quantitative, not qualitative. And the worse
> thing is, the team leader of the German translation team finds the current
> position and its current status okay. That's wrong and never should happen.
> If a German person is not able to understand the context of a translated
> sentence, the phrase should not be commited. Many people are even not re-
> reading the tsentence whether it has any meaning after the translation. But
> our team leader says, quantitative translation is okay. Ugly grammar and
> spelling issues are another thing; seems too much to re-read or to use a
> spellchecker before commiting - our teamleader says, that everything must
> fast go to upstream...great! I now know lots of German speaking people (in
> their mother tongue), which use Fedora only in English - including myself -
> to avoid the must of reading that horrible German. Surely, we can fix that,
> but if always people are working against, that does not help. Unluckily,
> language translations don't make it that often into Fedora updates during
> the lifetime of a Fedora release. So mostly, a broken translation is kept
> there for the whole release. But it's okay to be only quantitative and not
> qualitative, our team leader of the German translation project prays.

I think one big improvement, the translation team could do is setting up
a pootle server do to the translations, it can also commit to CVS,
Subversion, darcs, git and Bazaar.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index

It has several features, that are quite usefull like:

 *suggestion mode: If a translator is unsure about the correct context
of the translated sentence, he can make a suggestion and anyone else can
prove the correctness. This would prevent to commiting 'horrible
German'.

 *web-based translation editor: This is helpfull, so anyone can do
translations from everywhere without having to be on one's own system
and nothing has to be installed locally.

 *terminology matching and updatetm: I like this two features, because
they help to keep the consistency! While translating, you get
suggestions from translations already done. Terminology matching searchs
for single words like "file" and updatetm shows similar sentences like:

"Please enter the name:"
might give suggestions like
        “Please enter the names”
        “Please enter name:”
etc, if these entries are available in the translation memory.


I would support any efforts to improve the situation, if supported and
agreed from the rest of the translation team...


	Thomas