2012/11/15 Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@yahoo.com>
Bugs are bugs. They will be resolved eventually. :) Translations are a different topic.
A serious challenge we have at the moment is we don't have any how-to or guide to help people translate text. There are two primary file types containing translations: po and docbook files. Each file type needs attention.
Another challenge is all original text is written in English. A translator therefore needs a good grasp of English as well as his or her native language. Yet even with that grasp, somebody with a native English background should be available to help or mentor translators to ensure context is translated correctly because not all non-native English speakers will understand context correctly.
Another challenge for anybody trying to update these files is not speaking the other languages. When I update these file types with simple updates, such as converting instances of kde -> tde, I have no way to know whether the changes I make are good or whether I introduced incorrect translations. I have to be very careful when making such changes such that I don't perform a massive global search-and-replace that modifies text within other text strings that should not be changed. I have seen this happen often with other patches.
In the end, somebody native to each language has to review all texts and be willing and able to offer changes. They don't have to offer patches, just text files of what to change. Somebody else can convert the changes to a patch.
To start all of this, we really need a basic guide at the wiki to help translators.
One more issue about i18n packages:
can you provide a separate packages and git reposetories for each translation?
A monolithic overlay is over 2Gb and release package is over 500M... It's too heavy if you don't need them all...