[josm-dev] JOSM Translations

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sun Oct 2 22:39:50 BST 2011


Hi,

On 10/02/2011 11:09 PM, Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> the JOSM translations for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic and Turkish
> don't fullfill the minimum standards for some time now. The translation
> status can be seen at http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Translations. I
> did not finally decide yet, but I tend to remove these languages in
> future releases when situation does not improve.

With JOSM continuously gaining more features, maintaining full 
translations, especially those spoken only by a small group of mappers 
or worse, only by translators who are not even familiar with mapping, 
becomes harder.

At the same time, I guess that "power users" are more likely to be able 
to use the English version of the program.

For this reason - but not for this reason alone - I would love to see 
something like a "JOSM light", a version of JOSM that brings the 
benefits of a stable, standalone, offline-capable editor without tons 
and tons of extra features.

I have no idea how this should be achieved. One way would certainly be 
to reverse course and put more stuff back into plugins - possibly 
improving the plugin architecture along the way. Trying to fork off a 
JOSM light would also be an option.

This would enable us to have an almost fully translated "JOSM light" 
that beginner users could use without having to fear the occasional 
un-translated English message.

At the same time, there would be clear priorities for translators - 
translate the JOSM light messages first, then progress to the more 
complex things needed for the full feature set. At the moment, a 
translator would not know if "You moved more than {0} elements." is more 
or less important to translate than "Please launch the preferences 
dialog and retrieve another OAuth token." ...

Even if we fail to make a proper "JOSM light", that last issue - knowing 
which texts are part of everyday mapping and which aren't - is something 
that we could investigate. Would it, for example, be possible to use 
different translation wrappers in the code - e.g. tr1(), tr2(), tr3() 
instead of only tr() - to denote importance?

Bye
Frederik

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



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