Re: [Monotone-devel] usabilty of translations

[Philipp Gröschler]

On 29.05.2010 15:34, Zbigniew Zagórski wrote:
> I know that amongst developers (at least professional ones), there is
> strong movement to use english-only UI/termsinstead native ones -
> ad-hoc created terms create only confusion and thus are problematic
> (at least polish IT/CS terminology/vocabulary is week) . YYMV but in
> my experience- use only english terms.
> 
> So then ... I this experience is similar to yours?

Nearly all software on my boxes, either workstations or servers, is
using the english language. Thanks to Gentoo, I removed the "nls" use
flag and so every package compiles with english messages only. Monotone
too, of course.

First, most of the text ist shorter to read and uses less space in the
UI. Second, no trouble with character sets. English text tends to stay
in the 7bit ASCII range, so you can cleanly read the output, despite
terminal settings. Third, and that's possibly the most important, if I
encounter an error message, it's far more likely that I will get search
results for the english error message, than for example for a german
one, which would be my native language.

<off topic> :-)

For my opinion, much of the work which is put into translations today
should be put into working with the actual code. Also many translators
tend to translate *everything* and also often literally. In KDE set to
english, two example icons are captioned with "Paste" and "Fetch Feed".
With german setting I would get "Von Zwischenablage einfügen" and
"Nachrichtenquelle abholen". That's kind of ridiculous.

</offtopic>

To put it short: +1 for english messages, they're the only ones I need
for the above stated reasons.

My zwo Pfennig,

Philipp