Friday, July 21, 2006

New blood

New blood in the KDE world should be a good thing, but sometimes it is not.
Why? oh! Why?
you may ask.
It depends on how you use that new blood.

A very good way to use the new blood is Season of KDE. You get new developers, features that interest them and some mentor to help them if they find themselves lost. Almost sure a win situation. This way we are getting a person (Rafael Rodríguez) to try to fix the VERY SLOW rendering of patterns in okular.

Then there is the bad way, and sorry Jonathan, i know i kinda promised you not to bitch more about Rosetta, but i have to. That nice Translate This Application button is the worst executed idea ever. It redirects you to a page where people will translate applications for KUbuntu (potentially overriding real KDE translation) and people will not know they are not contributing to KDE, moreover this people probably won't know the style used for translations, so their translation will be totally out of the rest of translations.

The good implementation of that idea should have been putting that person in contact with the KDE translators team, but that would remove the KUbuntu coolness from the equation ...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very true. Translating an apps comes with rules and consistency to follow.

I translated my first app now,
and i can safely say i wouldn't be able to put such high quality in it without the help and feedback of my local KDE team.
In such team you learn from each other, you pass the knowlegde, hints and little know hows. The team can also help getting a higher drive doing the job. This all is very important if you want doing the job longer then just one or two days.

Not to forget you'll go around the whole local KDE teams doing this, right?

Not this is a bad idea in general, but im my view it should be shaped (some wizard on the site?) with to help pointing in the right direction of the already established KDE teams. (and fallback on rosetta when there is none)
Otherwise you'd do double work, quality probably goes down, you have less fun etc...

Anonymous said...

I agree too ... on the Norwegian translations mailing list, questions about how certain bad translations have come into applications that already have been translated by others. At least in one case (Amarok), the mantainer said "How could this happen?", and since it was in Ubuntu, the conclusion was Rosetta, a program that now has a very low standing on that list.

Anonymous said...

So true... In the spanish translator list, many people complained about rosetta, and many of them, kubuntu users. In some applications, they've found that some guy touched a 100% translated application, and made changes to perfectly valid strings. The only change was to capitalize the string, which is against spanish ortograpy.

IMHO, rosetta sucks, and is going against the KDE translators, because changes in rosetta, are never feed back to the original translation.

Anonymous said...

... but Rosetta is esier than fullfill all these Requirements for only writhing a very small "What's This' -Text:
taken from http://quality.kde.org/develop/modules/

Writing WhatsThis: whatsthis is the the context help property of Qt/KDE applications. It\'s an excellent first step for a new contributor, as it is gratifying and simple to perform.
Requirements:
To know well the involved applications
To maintain a local SVN repository with the unstable KDE module. Check if your module can be built with kdelibs from 3.4, so you can use the stable KDE 3.4 as a base, or if you have to use unstable KDE. See more about this in the SVN Guide
To know how to manage your local SVN repository differences from the main repository. More about this in the Managing Your KDE SVN Working Folder Guide to learn how to apply and revert patches, dealing with conflicts, etc...


...I only want to help a little bit and not take a new 20% Job with maintining a local SVN and a second Partition for the newest beta etc. etc..

In my Opinion it would be best, if one (like me) can work with an Application as normal user and just klick on a "Translate this label" (i.e. Shift+Esc+?). The translation would then be sent to the real Translation-Team. When the Team gets enough corresponding "Translation-suggestions", one of the Core-Team can apply them to the SVN or somthing like that.

Anonymous said...

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