[Bf-committers] [Bf-translations-dev] About translations (i18n) contexts

[- LEON -]

Hi all,

During the past years, I've reported so many bugs, thanks to all passionate
devs, most of them are finally resolved. But when we talked about **i18n
bugs**, it always was so awkward for some reason, for years... Last time
when we mentioned "i18n project maintanance is on hold", it was really a
shock to me, because definitely it was born for a very good reason at the
beginning. I know devs got different standpoints on this issue. I can well
understand that, just want to share my opinion here:

Language diversity is something about culture, and we cannot force one to
totally understand or accept another, and definitely we shouldn't, vise
versa. But I believe we could at least try to respect that fact, and
realize that English is NOT the one that is spoken by the largest
population around the world. True, it is the most popular one, but not the
only popular one I should say. And, there are countless people out there,
students, designers, artists, FOSS fans, who really want to get involved
with Blender (they really should :-)), but a sad thing is, to do that, they
will have to learn a second language (English) first! In that case,
learning curve becomes horrible. Or, they don't have to, just with the help
of a **USEABLE** UI translation. Yeah, the word "useable" should really be
stressed, because for them it is either useable or useless. To be truely
honest, things now are getting worse, and there's nothing that all
passionate translators can do to help their compatriots further, to help
propagating Blender further.

As one of the active translation contributors, IMHO, I believe no one
touched i18n more than Bastien. So, if he says there is a valid way to fix
the horrible ambiguity/polyseme issue (yeah, horrible, because now it
causes the UI translation silly enough), I'll totally vote for that idea. I
have one faith: If i18n project gets better, then there will be chances for
more people to get involved, in their appropriate ways, peer to peer for
sure. Finally, vast contributions and donations will go towards Blender
Foundation! It is a typical virtuous cycle, a win-win thing benefiting
everyone, isn't it?

An indefinite on-hold doesn't actually help anything to anyone here. As I
said, UI translation plays such an important role to Blender that it is
either useable or useless. Please, make it useable.  :)

Blenderheads, translators and devs, two years have passed, it's time to
face it, share your thoughts on this point.


On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 7:27 PM, Bastien Montagne <montagne29 at wanadoo.fr>
wrote:

> Hey,
>
> So, almost two years ago, the 'disambiguation' process of our i18n
> messages was freezed
> (see
>
> http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-translations-dev/2013-March/000424.html
> for details).
>
> Since then, people who are translating Blender have been quite
> frustrated, because you sometimes
> cannot make a valid translation (polysemy, a same english word meaning
> different things depending
> on contexts).
>
> We do have a valid way to fix that, called gettext contexts. It’s not
> ideal, it’s not perfect, but:
> * it is simple
> * it works
> * it does not need to redesign our whole UI message system!
>
> One month ago, a TODO task (https://developer.blender.org/T43295) was
> created on this subject,
> with not much attention from people from UI team so far, so I’m inclined
> to just resume adding
> needed contexts in code. We cannot wait years for someone to redesign
> from scratch our
> UI messages system.
>
> Cheers,
> Bastien
> _______________________________________________
> Remember to *NEVER* commit to our svn's /trunk, but *ALWAYS* to relevant
> language po file under /branches!
>
> Found a missing msgid? Edit this doc: http://goo.gl/XcWcr
>
> Have some disambiguation issue (i.e. same english word that should be
> translated in more than one way, depending on the context)? Edit this doc:
> http://goo.gl/VzppJ
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-translations-dev mailing list
> Bf-translations-dev at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-translations-dev
>



-- 
Leon Cheung
a.k.a. Zhang Yu | 老猫