[maemo-developers] Maemo localization to officially non-supported languages

[From: Igor Stoppa]

Hi,
On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 15:14 +0300, ext Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 14:56 +0300, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> > Kimmo Hämäläinen <kimmo.hamalainen at nokia.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Wrong.  It would depend on the context and language.
> > 
> > Yes, it COULD, fer-crying-out-loudly. :) We have the data now to
> > figure out whether it actually DOES for the set of our supported
> > languages.
> 
> 'For the set of our supported languages' -- quoting you -- 'that way
> lies madness'. You would need to do this verification every time you add
> a new language, or change the context a bit.
> 
> > > And what happens when you add a new, more 'context-sensitive'
> > > language?
> > 
> > We change the code.  Simple.  Providing unneeded context is bad in my
> > opinion, and the way we do it with the logical ids is excessivly ugly.
> 
> You also need to retranslate and test all the supported languages for
> the new strings (some of that you could maybe automate). Changing the
> code is the easy part. Why not make the engineering English unique, and
> use it instead of the logical ids ("OK 1", "OK 2" ;)), hey, we do it
> with variable names in code already...

FWIW, here's my 2cents:
I don't use localised images simply because i find revolting what is the
commonly understood "right way" of translating english terms to italian
and therefore i wouldn't really be of any help.

Hence my contribution in that direction is nil.

Then enters the logical_ids: I get 8cm long strings on a button that is
designed to accept 6-8 characters (btw, that also would be affected by
certain localizations, but let's ignore it for the moment).

So even where i _could_ be of some help in providing feedback, I cannot
because i have no clue of what the logical id means.

And i am not going to read the UI specs just for that.

I suppose this applies to many others, here. So logical IDs semm to be a
nice way to hide away logical errors.

-- 
Cheers, Igor

Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa at nokia.com>
(Nokia Multimedia - CP - OSSO / Helsinki, Finland)