Re: [l10n] Debian Installer translation status
On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 10:52:13AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> -1st stage/2nd stage packages : Dennis Stampfer has working stuff for
> all this. This will improve soon - several 2nd stage packages do not use
> CVS, or use their own private CVS (or SVN). We should encourage
> maintainers to move to Alioth and give translators CVS (or SVN) write
> access
Denis Barbier seems to have some kind of script, which extracts all
.po-files from the current unstable branch. Would it be sensible to push
these (or at least the debian/po subdir) into an appropriate l10n effort's
Alioth CVS repository? This way, an Alioth project (debian-l10n-*) would
be a single place for the translation team members to work, whereby the
translation team coordinator (or whoever) would make sure that the
translation get fed back in. Combined with the scripts the Durch team has
written, the work would be much easier, considering the low amount of
non-translative work like synchronising the templates etc.
> -identical strings in partman : something should be done for this as
> this is really annoying for translators. The worst are *nearly*
> identical strings....
This is a real PITA ;) And also one more point: there are far too many
strings in the debian-installer alone, which are misleading and also
"geeky". An example could be the string somewhere in partman like "Sorry,
your partition type is unsupported by libparted, if can add it, please
contact us". Don't know about priority, but this is certainly not
something a user wants to see. I would want these either, even when I'm
installing a server.
The other kind of strings is more like "I really don't know what has gone
wrong, the script I uses sucks and returns only true or false, so it could
be nothing, could be a serious error, well I don't know, you are the
master....". These error messages are unfitting, misleading, and plain
useless - if the error could be pretty much anything, why bother to tell
this? The same with lilo: "Continuing might be possible". Is it or is it
not? How does one determine this?
> -we need ALL translators to follow debian-boot. I proposed a dedicated
> mailing list but several translators weren't enthusiast about it. So,
> PLEASE, at least use a [l10n] marker for l10n issues in debian-boot
Actually, a l10n-list would be necessary. The problem is just that most of
l10n work is currently done on debian-installer (in other areas l10n seems
not to have a priority :() and every other message will be then
cross-posted to debian-boot. If we decide on the charta of the new list,
it should be created.
> -we still miss some important languages in the world (Hindi, Indonesian,
Then, we'll have scalability problems, as all the languages require more
space on CDs/floppies, etc and also might require bigger fonts (bigger as
in 'consuming more space'). Could it be possible to auto-create
language-bases CDs/floppies/usb-discs etc., so that a downloader can
choose "German netinst" or "Arabic usb-flash" to download. Of course,
there should then be a multi-language CD, which would then be bigger but
we wouldn't need to bother about lacking space on floppies (which wouldn't
be available in multi-language edition) and we also would have more space
for other things (wouldn't this also solve the 32Mb problem?)
--
Nikolai Prokoschenko
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org
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