Hoi,
Many words have been used about translations and the associated workflow
even before this fund raiser, at that stage the fund raiser itself was not
given priority. The notion that the workflow is a surprise that has not yet
been considered makes it plain why contributions from the non-English world
are so low. It is exactly the notion that an English version can go life
before all others that makes all other languages second class citizens. When
this is as intended, it is no surprise at all why translators switch off and
contributions are not as good as hoped for.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Jan 4, 2008 4:15 AM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 1/4/08, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You seem to miss Berto's point, which is how
disrespectful to
translators it is to throw things at them at the last minute.
Is it necessarily so, though? If our understanding is that non-English
versions will go up later than the English one, then that is not an
unintended, but an intended outcome. I'm not saying that should be the
case -- we probably want to aim for some general buffer time for
translations -- but I'm pretty sure that there are always going to be
situations where it _will_ be, because sometimes decisions are made at
the last minute, and a last minute decision is often better than none
(and so is a last minute translation).
That is not to say that the process could not have been handled much
better -- but to be honest, getting the translations workflow figured
out was not anyone's top priority in the last few weeks. Indeed, the
relocation and reorganization is the highest one, and vis-a-vis the
fundraiser, it's been items like the new site design, the various
changes to the notice, the blog (which itself is appallingly
monolingual), and (very importantly) countless efforts to target major
donors and generate PR for the fundraiser. If things magically got
translated, too, that was always awesome to behold. :-)
What is the preferred process right now? I assume notifying
translators-l of any particular message that needs to be localized is
sufficient?
--
Erik Möller
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