Re: Deactivated languages
On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 11:07:26PM +0000, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> IIRC this discussion happed in 2004, before Frans took over from Joey.
> The consensus back then was that a partial translation is worst because
> it leads people not fluent in English to invest their time just to
> fall over a obstacle later.
Thanks, that's the information I was looking for and it also matchs
Steves reply.
So this problem is just a missing fallback language in the Installer?
This could be implemented easily.
Lets add to the list of available (complete) translations a new item
"Further languages (partly incomplete)" and provide a new list with
incomplete translations in the next dialog. It could be followed by a
new dialog asking for a fallback language (supporting two languages
could cause trouble with fonts, I know).
If Frans or Christian had mentioned this earlier it could already be
implemented ... But they do not even explain their policy and keep it
secret! There was never an explanation like: "Until we support the
infrastructure to have a fallback language we are very sorry to
need to deactivate a few languages to avoid confusion to the user".
Again the only reason I remember was the ability to blacklist
translators which is unsocial (I hope you agree on this).
It was also not yet considered that only a very small amount of messages
are shown to the user. Many error texts will never be displayed. A
different metric to determine the coverage of a language could change
current statistics!?
Another issue which conflicts with dropping incomplete languages is that
many people I know speak only one language (this may be different for
countries where many languages are spoken). In such a case it would be
completely useless to remove a incomplete languages "to help avoiding
confusion because of partial English messages."
I'm still not sure whether a patch which implements this would be
excepted ...
Jens
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