gnucash-docs

[Christian Stimming]

Chris Lyttle wrote:

>>>Now we have a choice moving forward, to cut the translated docs so that
>>>perhaps someone using GnuCash will be encouraged to write new ones or
>>>translate my new help to their language or to include the old docs in
>>>the hope that someone will see the english docs are better and proceed
>>>to translate. 
>>>
>>I kind prefer the latter. 


Sorry, I have to object here. Please don't think first about potential 
translators -- think first about actual users, which make up 99,5% of 
the downloads. If they click on "Help" and (since an old, crappy 
transaction happens to exist in their locale) get a really outdated 
crappy version of docs, they are really pissed off ("Can't these guys 
write correct documentation instead of this piece of sh*t?"). If they 
would get an up-to-date help that just happens to still be in english, 
the overall impression is *much much* better ("Ok, they don't have a 
translated help, but at least it's up to date and tells me how things 
work.")

As for translators -- don't underestimate them. Every translator knows 
what he/she's doing. Every one knows that if there is an exhaustive 
english documentation, it's gonna be a lot of work to translate it. An 
existing but crappy documentation doesn't lower the barrier at all. It 
just turns off users. Therefore I absolutely agree with Chris here, and 
I really disagree with Linas here. Please don't keep outdated 
translations around.

>>For example: message catalogs: gnucash-1.4 had more translations than
>>1.6 ever did (or 1.7 does, to this day).  Some of the translations that
>>were cut never came back.  (ukrainian is one that comes to mind).


Please don't compare apples and oranges here. How many message strings 
did 1.4 have? I'm too lazy to lookup, but I guess it was some number 
below 1000. 1.6 had 1600, and we eventually arrived at 13 (thirteen) 
complete translations nevertheless. 1.8 will have 2600. Every new 
release re-used the translations from the old release, but you can only 
reuse translations for identical messages. It is simply wrong to talk 
about "translations that were cut back". Of course if your message 
catalog is smaller it is more likely to have more translations. If your 
application (and thus the message catalog) grows, it is less likely to 
quickly get complete translations. And, as the existing translated 
messages remain at its fixed number, the translated fraction will of 
course shrink when the absolute number of messages grows.

I'm kind of upset about Linas' statements here since they sound like 
he's blaming somebody (e.g. the rest of the gnucash team) for "messing 
up with translations" or similar. Truth is, there is nobody to blame for 
the "reducing number" of translations. It is simply a direct outcome of 
the overall growth of the application.


Christian