Juan J. Martínez used to talk here about Open Source and Other Things.
This is a blog in archive mode, you can read new posts at en_GB@blog
This particular thing freaks me out every day: left is $HOME, and right is $WORK.
Left is Fedora 14, and right is Ubuntu 10.10, both using Gnome and the same locale: en_GB.UTF-8.
For some reason the translation is different. I’m not sure, but I think I prefer Wastebasket over Rubbish Bin (although the second one sounds more British), but I’m not a native English speaker.
Which one do you prefer?
I think one of the most important parts of a UI it’s that the texts are properly translated to the language of the user, and right now Nautilus Flicker Uploader needs more translations.
Translations improves the user experience substantially, even when the fallback mechanism of using default language (English) when there isn’t a suitable translation can be OK for some people.
When you want people to contribute translations, you must make it as easy as possible. I found Launchpad’s Rosetta very good at this point, because it’s even funny to translate things (results may vary depending on the translator and the software being translated heh).
But because I already have covered most of the important parts of the project (hosting, SCM, bug tracking, …), I didn’t feel like adding my little project to Launchpad just because of Rosetta. So I tried Transifex, but I must confess I’m a little disappointed.
Seems that by now you can’t register a project using the web, so you must send an email requesting the project addition. I did it, but seems there was a problem with my initial email, because nothing happened.
So I tried with another mail, and they apologized because seems the mail got lost in the place where lost email goes when nobody reads it. That reply was Sept 9th, and today the project haven’t been added yet.
Anyway, I’m looking for translators. It’s so easy, it won’t take you more than 15 minutes because right now the UI it’s pretty simple and there are very few strings to translate, so if you can fetch the English .po file and translate it to your mother tongue, it would be great!
You can submit the translated file to reidrac at usebox dot net.
The translator role is one of the easiest and more remarkable ways to contribute to Fedora, because your contribution can help people to use free software without the barrier of the language (AKA not everybody understands English).
Update: German translation added thanks to Marcus Nitzschke! Now we have: en, es, fr and de!
Update 2: David Rey contributed the Galician translation. Thank you!
This is Evolution 2.26.2, and Expunge vs Compactar: translation FAIL!
If you don’t speak a word in Spanish, the translation says: Are you sure you want to permanently remove all the messages in folder … (inbox)? Yes, the deleted part is missing.
It’s not the first time I expunge a folder in Evolution, but it’s the first time I cry: WTF!?!
I’ve filled a bug: Bug 587116 – Expunge confirmation dialog asks to “premanently remove all the messages”.
A nice ‘step by step’ guide with images.
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from A few reasons why Rosetta should not be considered as a translation platform for existing open source projects, by Og Maciel.
Interesting thoughts (and facts!) about translations in Open Source projects, Rosetta (Canonical’s tool for translating), and the need of upstream collaboration.
I agree with Maciel about the problems that (sometimes) has caused the inefficiency of Ubuntu distribution to send back the improvements they made. Right now comes to my mind the early problems with Debian.
