Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 10:16:10AM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Am Montag, 12. Februar 2007 09:50 schrieb Magnus Hagander:
> > Right. But will they rush to do that even if we have easier tools to do
> > it?
>
> I would love to translate some pages, but frankly anything short of a PO file
> or some equivalent technology isn't going to excite any translators for long.

A .po file is easier than a plaintext file? Well, I'm don't do much
translating myself, but I can't see how translating a webpage can be
easier than translating the actual text of the webpage in the file...

(We do have .po files for the strings that come out of the PHP code
directly)

As for news and such, there's a web interface. Are you saying that's
also too complex? Frankly, I don't see how a .po would make that better,
but again I'm not used to working with these things.

> > There's also the question of wether it's a good thing to have a say 15%
> > translated site, vs a 0% translated one. If we have a 15% translation,
> > that will give a very strange impression for people going there with a
> > browser set for that language - some pages come up in their language,
> > the majority comes up in a completely different language.
>
> By that theory, no translation of open-source software would ever take place.

Well, I stand by that opinion. I know for examlpe pgAdmin only ships
translations that are n percent or better (iirc, it's 85% or so), which
makes it reasonable. Shipping something that only has 15% translation
rate does the user a disservice, imho.

//Magnus