questions about when and how it is appropriate to translate storage terms

[David Shea]

(copied to anaconda-devel-list)

Greetings, i18n list. I have a few questions about how things related to 
storage should be translated. I have a few situations where I would like 
to know how a non-English speaker (and in particular a speaker of a 
language that uses non-Latin characters) would expect something to be 
displayed, and how they expect something to be input.

1: Partition labels.

For display, consider the following screen: 
http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/es_format_summary.png Should 
anything in the type ("Tipo" in this image) column be translated? Things 
like "partition", "physical volume", "BIOS Boot", "EFI System 
Partition". Some of these strings also represent names that are written 
to the partition table for disk labels that support it. Would you expect 
these strings to be localized or would they all be in English? Would a 
system with a non-English firmware display something like "EFI System 
Partition," or would it be a localized string?

2: Partition sizes

If you want to create a partition that's 500MB, how would you input that 
size? How would you expect it to be displayed?

Here's a couple of images in Kazakh since it's non Latin and happens to 
have translations in blivet: 
http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/kk_size_input.jpg 
http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/kk_size_display.jpg

Would you expect sizes to be displayed as the localized МБ, or would you 
expect "MB"? How would you expect to be able to input the size? Should 
it be able to accept both localized and English sizes?

Related to that, the localized "МБ" and other strings are built by 
concatenating the translation of "M" for mega- with the translation of 
"B" for byte. Is that problematic? What would be the correct to handle it?

Thank you for your help.

David Shea

[Karel Zak]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 11:46:29AM -0500, David Shea wrote:
> (copied to anaconda-devel-list)
>
> Greetings, i18n list. I have a few questions about how things related to
> storage should be translated. I have a few situations where I would like to
> know how a non-English speaker (and in particular a speaker of a language
> that uses non-Latin characters) would expect something to be displayed, and
> how they expect something to be input.
>
> 1: Partition labels.
>
> For display, consider the following screen:
> http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/es_format_summary.png Should
> anything in the type ("Tipo" in this image) column be translated? Things
> like "partition", "physical volume", "BIOS Boot", "EFI System Partition".
> Some of these strings also represent names that are written to the partition
> table for disk labels that support it. Would you expect these strings to be
> localized or would they all be in English? Would a system with a non-English
> firmware display something like "EFI System Partition," or would it be a
> localized string?

EFI uses UTF8, so it should not be problem for all applications (and
 firmwares) to read non-ASCII chars from partition table. The label is
 just information for user and it's irrelevant for system (system
 cares about partition type).

The question is if we really need to set any partition labels. IMHO
 it's unnecessary. It's better to use UUIDs to identify the partitions
 and GUID to identify the partition type (and you can translate the
 partition types to human readable strings to keep things more
 user-friendly).

If you really need partition labels than you can use parted/fdisk,
 but it's overkill to support this feature for basic tools like
 anaconda.
> 2: Partition sizes
>
> If you want to create a partition that's 500MB, how would you input that
> size? How would you expect it to be displayed?

(/me grumbles something about MiB rather than MB :-)...
> Here's a couple of images in Kazakh since it's non Latin and happens to have
> translations in blivet:
> http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/kk_size_input.jpg
> http://dshea.fedorapeople.org/storage_i18n/kk_size_display.jpg
>
> Would you expect sizes to be displayed as the localized МБ, or would you
> expect "MB"? How would you expect to be able to input the size? Should it be
> able to accept both localized and English sizes?

Hmm... for example util-linux does not translate the size suffix.

Karel