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

[Aleksey Bragin]

        Hello Masahiro,
I've read your email, and found it really interesting.

I agree and disagree in some points of your email, and I answer between
lines in your email -- read below.


> 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.

Thanks -- I'm just haven't used to wiki, but I agree it's a good idea -- I
will convert all my lists into ROS-Wiki.

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

> 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.
It isn't boring at all :-) And you really discuss real problems.

> 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).
I may sound obvious but my point is to not let this happen.

> 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
Yes, I agree with you --- if a language have only one translator -- than I'd
better postpone the translation until we have at least two, who can review
each other's work. Otherwise the situation you're describing will certainly
happen. (Replace 'at least two' with 'at least n number of people' - where n
>= 2).

> 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
As for me, I always respect people, but if they have come to such a
situation, then they probably have done some errors during their work. (And
I'm not saying I know everything how to avoid this -- no, but with support
of other people I want to overcome this).

> 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.
Absolutely right.

> 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'
> -= skip =-
I don't know how other people likes this, but for now unfortunately I think
it's not very suitablel. Despite ROS is just technically can't do this (e.g.
lack of TCP/IP) - but even if we can, imagine very common situation - ROS
bugchecks arfter user have tried to run some application. And what to do? No
dialogs, nothing except for the blue text-screen showing stack trace.
Or another error example --- Quake-II is shown as bottom-up. User can go to
Bugzilla on the website and report this error. Or can click on that 'report
bug' button (unfamiliar to Windows user at all, and testers should know
bugzilla already, with these buttons) and still write the same text, and
send it using ROS (when it becomes mature enough). In this case bug-report
button is more suitable, but I still think it doesn't worth implementing it
yet.


> 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.
My POV on this is rather similar - if we can't do good translation right
now - better not do it at all, but wait until there are enough translators.

> It's still a "draft idea", there might be some issues I'm not awared of.
Every idea is arguable, and in arguing the truth is.

> 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.
hmm.. I think if the translation is really bad, then really a lot of people
will notice that. And if someone is spreading the bad image of the software,
it might be the one who doesn't like that software at all, translation is
just an excuse :-) (joke)

> Any comments are appreciated.
> Regards, and thanks for reading,
> Masahiro.

I really appreciate people writing such letters - it improves the quality of
the work very much!

With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.