[ros-general] Translators ARE needed / Plan of work fortranslation

[M.Taguchi]

"Aleksey Bragin" <aleksey at studiocerebral.com> wrote:
> Translation can be roughly divided into 3 parts:
> 1. www.reactos.com website, it should become multilanguage
> 2. ReactOS Documentation (it's part of www.reactos.com website, but it goes
> into another category)
> 3. ReactOS itself (all text, strings, dialogs, applications, etc). It should
> be discussed and people should agree on the prefereable way to do this.

Hi,

I'd like to start with "light-weighted" matters;)

First, why don't you use ROS-wiki to list people who are willing to
translate? It supports the table-layout and much smart than posting the
HTML mails when there're changes, IMHO.

Next, I'm still willing to take the translation roll on Japanese.

And.. it might be too long to read, boring, redundant, and so on;but at
least Aleksey, please read the rest of this mail, it's a very important
thing to discuss.

I read the discussion on translation on this list and thought that
almost the same problem as other OSS have'll happen on ROS translation,
too. IMO, you can handle those languages which have many translators
easily(in this case, German, Dutch, and some other western languages).
If there're strange translations, they are easy to be found and fixed.
When there's a argument about translation, it's also solved easily; you
can vote or do anything you like. But on the languages which have few
translators, the circumstances'll be definitively different. Before
arguing about this, I want to make the point clear; do you guys think
that those terrible translations on some OSS(e.g.Linux, some guys
mentioned) are done on purpose? Do you guys think the translators on
those projects are nothing but fools? You can always do much better
than them? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Those translators try to translate as
far as they can, but they fail to make good translations because of
miss, lacking of experience, etc... So, those who noticed that the
translations are mess, they are (at least partially) potentially better
translators than the main-translator who're working on the projects.
But why those "messy" translations are left as they are? In most cases
I think, it's because those users don't report the matter but just
complain:"the translation is a mess!!!". Hmm, what's lines the claimers
and the testers? I believe it's whether they report what they found and
or propose the solutions or not. Yeah, it's a quite important problem.
There're more and more potential testers all over the world but most of
the software vendors(not only the OSS, but also the proprietary vendors
I think) are just cutting them off and categorize they are "claimers".
What a wasteful loss! Anyway, I think you guys agree on the point that
if there are more contributers, things turn to better states. Of course,
I don't mean that the state that everyone have unlimited access on CVS
is great. It's clear that it'll cause a catastrophe. No review, no rule,
no order, no peace:) Well, obeying the opensource bazzar model, it's
quite natural to try on taking the so-called "claimers" into the
project as "testers" and/or "reviewers". So I propose the above(about
the ROS iself):
why don't you put a "bug/translation report" button next to the
minimize/maximize button on all dialogs/windows shown on ROS for a
"tester edition" or something? I'm not sure but I think some Unix'
window manager have this feature to have more feedbacks. On production
release, there'll be many users who doesn't like the strange buttons
are shown on their windows, so it'd be stripped away from the
production release(the future release for practical use, I mean).
* Clicking the button'll show the dialog to report bug/translation
feedback which has a form consisted of the user's name and comment box
to fill in.
* Fill in the forms and click "feedback" to send the app-path, window
name, and the comments to the server.
/* Note: we should apply the forms which are completely blank, because
the translation matters are mostly caused by lacking of translators'
awareness, because there're massive amount of strings/documents. The
numbers of fully-blanked forms'll be great help for translators to
indicate the problems. It doesn't tell nothing, but DOES tell there're
odd points on the dialogs/windows. */
* Then translators view the feedbacks and decide what to do.

I think most of you should've noticed; this "feature" requires at least
tweak on dialog API and support for TCP/IP, but it's worth implementing
(tho I can't take the implementation roll).

I'm not writing this massive messy unrecognizable English mail because
I've accidentally had this idea, but I've seen the terrible state of
softwares/OS's and thought how to make them better over times. For
instance, KDE stripped away the Japanese locale from their release
because it was lacking of quality and quantity, in spite of they have
great system to coodinate translations. (Well, it's partially solved
problem now, as the tragic state became a article on slashdot-jp and
eventually many people noticed the problem, proposed to help them.)
Then, it's clear that the same problem'll happen on ReactOS. I'm almost
sure. So we should expand the bazzar model to user-land. It'll cause a
few problems but the benefits are countless.

It's still a "draft idea", there might be some issues I'm not awared of.

But I'd like to repeat; remember, many users complain the terrible
quality of translation but curerntly, most of them just complain,
overlook, and spread bad image of those softwares, but don't report and
try to make them better. It'll be a great help if we can take them into
the project as testers.

Any comments are appreciated.

Regards, and thanks for reading,

Masahiro.