[josm-dev] JOSM-Tested

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> This wouldn't solve the issue of having 100% complete translations at
> time of release. But it seems that for overall translation
> completeness Translatewiki is working great for OSM. We both have
> active OSM contributors, and an active general translation community
> contributing.

To be honest I'm not keen on having anything translated by members of a 
general translation community. There are many things which, I believe, 
need the OSM context to be translated properly.

I recently changed the E->D translation on launchpad for a number of 
OAuth related items. I don't remember what the problem was exactly but 
it was clear that the translator did not know anything about how OAuth 
works, but just chose context-free translations of the terms involved. 
This resulted in a very skewed overall picture. The person did have an 
OSM background but it seems no OAuth knowledge.

I would expect many more problems of that caliber to show up if we let 
people without OSM exposure translate stuff. It may just about work for 
the web site (but even there I'm skeptical) but not for a sophisticated 
editor.

In my eyes, a *bad* (or half-good) translation is worse than no 
translation at all. If members of the JOSM or at least OSM community do 
not have the time to translate JOSM into Ancient Greek then I'd prefer 
not to have an Ancient Greek JOSM at all, rather than having an Ancient 
Greek JOSM which has been translated by Ancient Greek enthusiast who 
knew nothing of OSM.

Unfortunately the statistics capture quantity, not quality.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"