Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@tin.it> writes:
Hello, it's the first time I cooperate with the translation of a distribution, so I'm not expert in the field. However, the planning of translations seems lacking to me.
Alberto, there are different things to translate: Those on the media and those on some servers: Release Notes and the community distros strings are available online The Release Notes will be changed also after the GA date. Therefore we can translate them at later times as well.
During the official translation period we had changes to .po files which made us translate or check strings again due to unexpected changes, with a significant lack of time for translators.
After string freeze, I may understand the changes to release-notes, but we had changes mainly to zypper, zypp, and, in minor measure to other .po files.
Now an almost completely untranslated .po file appears, while feature and string freezes are passed.
Why isn't a better planning in translation done to avoid repetitive work? It would be enough to set a hard string freeze one month or so before the translation deadline and to make developers absolutely respect it (27 strings changed in release notes!) so to give time to translators to translate strings and proofread only once.
I hope this will be seriously considered for the next openSUSE release.
The problem is not translation - the problem lies in development where some changes are really needed. Another challenge lies in testing - if some development is late and/or testing is late, then we might need to do some changes based on that testing. Unfortunately some of them effect translation. It's not easy what to do in these case? Not change a wrong string? Change it but not translate it? I agree we should strive to get everything out early - in an optimal world, you only translate after all the testing is done. But we're not there ;-( Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126