Guide Translations versus Bug Fixes

[Ruediger Landmann]

On 06/30/2010 06:29 PM, Nathan Thomas wrote:
> On 26/06/10 00:38, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
>    
>> On 06/25/2010 10:31 PM, Eric "Sparks" Christensen wrote:
>>      
>>> Personally, I lean more towards the first option.  As Shaun, from GNOME,
>>> said last night, "...I don't think fully translated docs are worthwhile
>>> if they're wrong".
>>>        
>> This is only true for some values of "wrong" and some values of
>> "worthwhile".
>>
>> A fully-translated guide that accurately documents 90% of the procedures
>> that 90% of users are ever going to perform is indeed "worthwhile" to
>> most of those users most of the time.
>>
>> And of course, for the same values of "wrong" and "worthwhile" you can
>> just as easily and truthfully say "...I don't think docs that are not
>> wrong anywhere are worthwhile if they're not fully translated into a
>> language that I can read".[0]
>>
>> [0] and don't underestimate the importance of "fully". Consider a
>> procedure described in documentation that's 100% correct but where step
>> 4 is in a language that you can't read.
>>
>>
>>      
> But Rudi, is the situation described in your footnote any worse than
> having a procedure that is 100% readable but where step 4 is incorrect?
>    

It is precisely *as bad*. Re-read the body sentence to which the 
footnote applies -- I'm describing documentation that is not "incorrect" 
in any way at all.

More broadly, I'm suggesting that treating generalities like "wrong" and 
"worthwhile" (and "incorrect") as binary states (wrong/not wrong, 
worthwhile/not worthwhile) is not very helpful. If anything, 
translated/not translated is much closer to a binary state, but this 
isn't really true either, since fluency in a language is not a binary state.


> I would like to hear the thoughts of the localisation teams on this
> issue. How do they feel about their current workload? Would point
> releases be feasible for them?
>    

There are a few issues here. First, recall that no localisation team 
completely translates the entire documentation suite on the 
once-per-Fedora-release cycle that we're on *now*, let alone any point 
release.

Second, the fact that we make a point release of a book available for 
translation doesn't mean that anyone should feel compelled to translate 
it. If a particular language team translated version 13 of a book, but 
doesn't translate version 13.1, we would continue to make the 
fully-translated version 13 available on d.fp.o unless that team tells 
us that they'd rather have 13.1 up there, untranslated strings and all.

Third, I think that the second question is perhaps a little misleading; 
it's not a really question of whether L10N teams have the bandwidth for 
"point releases" per se, as whether L10N teams have the bandwidth (and 
motivation) for translating docs corrections and enhancements mid-cycle 
at all. Whether these changes are all rolled up together or presented 
piecemeal right across the documentation suite in the form of randomly 
broken strings is a little beside the point.
> I would also like to know roughly how many bugs we would likely to be
> fixing mid-cycle - do we have any statistics for the numbers of errors
> found in published guides for each cycle, so we can estimate what the
> workload is likely to be?
>    

You can get a rough answer to this with a Bugzilla search on any 
particular guide or with the a general query across the entire "Fedora 
Documentation" product.

Cheers

Rudi