gnucash-docs

[Linas Vepstas]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 12:15:46PM +0100, Christian Stimming was heard to remark:
> 
> 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 transaction happens to exist in their locale) get a really outdated 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.")

Its hard for me to guess how multi-lingual gnucash users really are. 
Can we assume most european gnucash users know some amount of english?
I guess this is a requisite for using Linux anyway?

I know that if I had to choose between a brand-new russian translation,
and an old, crappy english text, I'd pick the english text.   But maybe
this is a bad anology.

Maybe, for the info's, there's a way of putting two languages in the 
help menu, so that the user could work with both?

> 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. 

I'm surprised.  I'd assume that translators would be happy to do a
chapter at a time, rather than commit to doing the whole book at once.
Doing a chapter at a time does not imply laziness, any more than 
accusing a patch submitter of being stupid for not having re-designed
the whole module.  

> 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 

Actually, I didn't mean to blame (hey, without you, the translations
would be in bad shape indeed); and if there was, it was the
translators: I was suprised by the number of new translations that
arrived for 1.4, well after 1.5/1.6 was underway.  I had trouble
understanding why the translators didn't do 1.6 instead. (or in
addition).

--linas


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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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