fedora only for US users ?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Pekka Savola wrote:

> What I try to say that IMHO it is more important to spend the energy on
> development, testing etc. _in this specific distribution, which should be
> a "moving target", than continuously revising the translations.

Galeon and epy and Gnome in general use a continuously revised 
translation model. Mozilla does what you propose ie do everything in 
english and worry about translations last.

Guess which of these projects prompted a message today about the quality 
of the localizations ?

Localization is integral part of software like pretty icons, attention 
to ergonomy and so on. You can not expect to dump it on a final last 
stage and actually get a good results.

Granted, some people will never appreciate it just like others are 
colour-blind. That does not mean it is not important.

We are not talking about writing software from scratch here. To get into 
Fedora a project must at least reached the packageable state. If at this 
stage the project maintainers haven't even started thinking about 
localization we should really worry because there's little chance it 
will be done by the time Fedora core ships.

And I do realise that in some countries having english-only software is 
not crucial (either because they are english-speaking countries or 
because culturaly people are ready to accept working in a foreign 
tongue). But please do not generalise from those cases. They are far 
from constituting the bulk of the planet.

[...]

> However, what I do object to is getting into the state where we expect 
> translations to be one of the number one priorities in this particular 
> project.

Sure they won't be the number one priority. I'd be surprised something 
will - you need more than one focus to make a great product.

However there is no question in my mind they should be one of the 
biggest priorities at least for all the desktop stuff. Even native 
english speakers would appreciate a proper translation from irc english 
to litterary english I'm sure.

The sad fact is most coders can not write correctly in any language. If 
they could they wouldn't have chosen this branch of work anyway;)

Cheers

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot