Why are locale specific reports registered in po file? (Yasuaki Taniguchi/????)

[J. Alex Aycinena]

Comments below:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Yasuaki Taniguchi/谷口康明" <yasuakit at gmail.com>
> To: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:18:56 +0900
> Subject: [translation] Why are locale specific reports registered in po file?
> Hello, developers.
>
> I wonder why entries of locale specific reports (ex. US tax reports)
> are registered in po files?
> I think they are not only meaningless but also harmful. So they should
> be removed from po files and
> they are written in the original locale language.
> The reasons are as follows.
>
> (1) A person, who lives in US but prefer Japanese as usual, can't use
> US tax reports because
> some entries of tax reports are displayed in Japanese.
> Many users don't know how to change a locale of GnuCash dynamically.
>
> (2) A person who lives out of US doesn't use US tax report at all. So
> translation is not necessary.

This is undoubtedly true for the vast majority of gnucash users who
live outside of US but there may be non-US citizens or residents who
have to file tax forms with the US who live outside the US, many
non-English speaking.

>
> (3) Translators may do extra unnecessary works.
>

You are probably right about this; the number who would benefit is
probably very small.

> (4) If translators find msgids of locale specific reports should not
> be translated, some common
> words like "Account" are translated on locale specific reports and
> they can't avoid it.
>
> I attach an example of a US tax report with LANG=ja, and you will
> understand what is strange.
> Would you please consider it?
>

Just as a point of clarification based on your comment on the
attachment: the US Tax Report is not intended to be a report that is
filed with tax authorities in the form it comes out of gnucash. It is
intended to be a report that provides the tax information, with full
audit trail, that is then used by a gnucash user as a source document
for filling out the actual forms (whether manually or with the aid of
separate tax preparation software) that are then filed with the tax
authorities. The tax authorities would never see the gnucash report,
unless you were later audited and wanted to use it to show where you
got the numbers from.

Alex