Tobias Toedter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tapota : > Hi Mathieu, > > I just received a response from Yukihiro Nakai, the Japanese translator. I'm > quoting it here: > >> Hi, >> >> Japanese is now outside of any exitements and enthusiasms of >> Savannah/Savane because there is no way to enjoy the translation on the >> website. >> >> If they had some language selection combo box like >> http://gnomedesktop.org/, I would not be hesitate to update the >> translation, and other people would rush into the translation activities. >> >> Thanks. > > I wrote back to him that Japanese is already supported via the browser's > "accept languages" feature. I also wrote that I'll be talking to you again > about the idea of a link to the desired language. > > Maybe it's not that bad at all to add support of changing languages into the > account configuration, as you proposed? > > I can think of a situation where you would want to have most sites in e.g. > English, because on most sites, the available Japanese/French/German/whatever > translation is in quite bad shape. > > An exception is Savane/Gnomedesktop/KDE/whatever, where you would want to > have > it displayed in your mother tongue, because the translation is good. > > As far as I know, it's not possible (yet) to specify in the browser which > language to accept on a site-by-site basis. > > Again, I appreciate your comments.
The problem Yukihiro Nakai relates is off-topic. In fact, I guess that when Yukihiro Nakai said "there is no way to enjoy the translation on the website", he was talking about savannah.gnu.org. This problem is not related to the Savane project but to the apache set up at savannah.gnu.org that break gettext support. So with or without a link, he would not get savannah.gnu.org translated in any way. I think also highly questionnable to usage of select box for the language, that does not scale more than 20 entries, and there are way more languages spoke on earth. I maintain my previous statement: configuring the language should be done at another level, and bad translation on some software should not cause reimplementation of the langague selection in others software. By the way, some browser like Mozilla Firefox allows to change the language setting on the fly. I would not endorse a third level of language selection. While I'm not really in favor of this second level of language selection (in the browser) but can understand the rationale behind, the third level looks a bad idea to me, as I said before. I'm afraid that too many website are designed as a whole, while they are not: they just print content on a web browser, each one is already included in a desktop environment. Each website that reimplement what already exists for the exact same purpose in the web browser is clearly reinventing the wheel. While I can understand that a website got his own cosmetics, language selection and every other stuff should came from the the environment. For instance, it is really sad that Savane is forced to ask the user to select his timezone, while this information should be given by the system he is using. For instance, if tomorrow I got in Berlin, I would expect to set up my timezone on my desktop environment once and for all, and not on any website I'm using on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I have no choice. But for the language, it is possible, we should not forget that and provide a way to forgot that so easily. Especially since Savane is a program, not exactly a website with static content, where translation can be outdated and change the whole page content. With a program and gettext, untranslated stuff are printed in C locale, so the content is always the same, there's not outdated pages. Regards, -- Mathieu Roy +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | General Homepage: http://yeupou.coleumes.org/ | | Computing Homepage: http://alberich.coleumes.org/ | | Not a native english speaker: | | http://stock.coleumes.org/doc.php?i=/misc-files/flawed-english | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
