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Language Support Status

The GNOME support status of a language is determined by the percentage of the GNOME environment translated.

A language is said to be Supported if it is at least 80% translated, Partially Supported if it is at least 50% translated, or Not Supported otherwise.

Today

Counting the translated percentage is done in the simplest manner of "number of translated strings / total number of translatable strings".

Whats wrong?

There is no balance between the actual influence of a certain module on the GNOME experience and its influence on the translated percentage.

A loud example is the GNOME weather applet locations module. These locations strings appear in exactly one list view in the preferences window of the weather applet. Clearly they have a little impact on a user using a localized GNOME session. However, the locations strings count for 10% of the translated desktop. Lets say a language is all translated but the locations strings, I think it is safe to say it is 99% translated. But in the current situation it would have been 90%.

A minor example is Evolution which is an important part of the desktop for all Users/Developers/Administrators. Though important, the current 15% count of the translated desktop seems too much.

Why now?

With the addition of the GNOME Developer Tools package and the increased amount of translatable strings, the translation teams want to focus on what (they think) to be more important. Some would prefer to skip Anjuta or GtkProperties in favor of translating more commonly used applications/applets (For example: file-roller, bug-buddy, deskbar-applet, evince, ... ) which are easier to handle as they may have much less to translate. In such a case though the Desktop would yield a better localized experience but the percentage count would not grow as much as you would expect.

What can we do?

References

Comments

I think extending gradual completion is best thing to do here. We can have something like "Gold", "Silver" etc. languages for GNOME regarding their translation ratio. That would motivate the language teams in order to state their languages in upper league. Release notes can have a direct link of this grading on l10n.gnome.org web page. Even though it might be a little harsh to include massive modules, it would really harm the communities which have enough resource but wanting to up the bar. There should be a grading for documentation and even for extras modules. (BarisCicek)


CategoryGnomeI18n


2024-10-23 11:49