JOSM Translations

[Holger Mappt]

On 2017-02-19 at 14:19 +0100 Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> I had a look at our translation statistics recently and I find it awful,
> that there is no real progress to see, compared to the situation a few
> years ago.
>
> Does anybody have ideas how more translators could be attracted for the
> languages which have many missing texts?
>
> We do daily text uploads and although launchpad has issues from time to
> time it usually is stable. The tools exist.
>
> I think the main problem is that people aren't aware they could help and
> are needed to do so.

Hi,

It would be interesting to know how important translations are. Maybe it 
is okay for most of the users to use the English version.

I think one of the issues is the enormous number of strings. We reached 
10000 a few weeks ago. And there is a pretty high update frequency. You 
need days to catch up if no translation was done for a few months.

Another issue is the quality of the strings. Some source strings are not 
English (but French, Dutch, Polish, etc), have unknown acronyms in it, 
or it's just not clear what the string is about. That mainly affects 
plugins and the imagery. I sometimes open a ticket if the quality is 
bad. JOSM core tickets are resolved promptly, but plugin authors are 
lazy or don't respond at all. There is no good way to address issues 
with the imagery strings (there is actually no way).

Launchpad has issues all the time. It was okay for a while, but now the 
timeout error is back again, I get it every time I translate something. 
What's really missing is the possibility to comment a string to add 
hints for other translators.

One solution could be to separate the JOSM core strings from the plugin 
and imagery strings. Then translators can concentrate on the JOSM core, 
it would reduce the timeout errors, and it becomes doable to actually 
translate all (core) strings.

Plugins are a different topic. I think there is no way to attract people 
to translate a large number of strings that nobody will ever read. An 
idea would be to rank the untranslated strings by the number of plugin 
installations (do we know this?) to start with the important strings. 
But Launchpad sorts them alphabetically, not by importance.

For the imagery strings I opened ticket #12179, but it looks like no one 
is interested to improve the current situation.

Holger