On 27.11.2018 15:21, Mark Thomas wrote:
On 27/11/2018 13:19, Rémy Maucherat wrote:
Yes, I agree: it's not possible for non english speakers to use Tomcat, so
it did seem pointless. Mark still wanted to do the experiment, and since
the tool was easy and I had some time I did that French stuff. Anyway it's
done now, and people are sometimes happy to get i18n, so...
Congrats to everyone involved in completing the French translations and
in expanding the language coverage generally. And a special
congratulations / thank you to Rémy who contributed over 1700 (no, that
is not a typo!) translations.
I do think this experiment has been worthwhile.
Just as a note : I think so too.
But as far as I am concerned, the real usefulness was in showing how
dully/repetitive/uncertain such an exercise could be, how this could easily result in
imperfect/inconsistent translations (either stylistically, or technically) and in thinking
about how this process could possibly be made more agreeable/efficient/accurate/sustainable.
Yes, there are some
users who prefer English to their native language but there are also
some users who find the translations helpful.
No contest there.
What I am otherwise thinking is : there are many people who would like to look at an
original tomcat logfile, and understand much of it, but still have trouble with a
particular message or section. They might then want to quickly get a translation in their
own language, to check that they really got it, and then go back to the original, to pick
up the words in English that they will need, to search further (in Google, or in the
documentation). Because for these people, more often than not :
- changing the original language in which a tomcat server writes its logfile, will not be
an option (think a corporate server e.g.)
- or repeating the issue after changing the logging language will not be an
option
- or searching anywhere with the translated (non-english) message will not be a practical
option.
The good thing is that it
is easy to set Tomcat up to work either way.
I wonder. Is there any value in any of the following:
- The ability to change the language Tomcat uses while Tomcat is
running? I'm thinking an option exposed via JMX and the Manager app.
- The ability to 'translate' messages. I'm thinking something that takes
a message in one language, searches through the l10n strings to find a
match and then provides the same message in an alternative language.
Finding an efficient way to do this could be interesting.
I will take this as a oh-so-cautious acknowledgement that there might be something into
the "translation-on-the-fly" idea. But I think that it is still not exploiting the
current available technology fully, in the sense that someone will still need to maintain
these l10n files in the future, and I don't know how many Rémy's you are going to find
(repeatedly) for doing that, at the tomcat level.
Allow me to be a bit megalomaniac maybe for an instant.
There are hundreds of projects on the Apache.org page. Of these, maybe up to 50% are
Java-based, so they use roughly the same techniques to log messages.
They are also all relatively within the same general "computer area" of course.
This would lead me to think that many of these projects may have
- the same kind of basic vocabulary
- the same kind of problematic, in terms of making technical info/warning/error messages,
accessible preferably in many languages.
- the same kind of issues with keeping these messages and translations up-to-date,
accurate, meaningful, consistent.
- the same kind of manpower issues to achieve that lofty goal
So why not be looking at creating a global "Apache thesaurus" containing all these
technical terms and their translations (starting with tomcat of course), and creating some
global plugin software that can handle such translations for all these projects ?
In other words, some kind of "log4j+i18n"..
Oh, wait : https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/JOSHUA/
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