[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-tr] Concerns about translations and QGIS overall credibility

[Stefano Campus]

ciao to everyone, let me show you the Italian situation.

1) the use of QGIS in Italy, especially in the Public Administration,
continues to spread more and more.
When I say "Public Administration" I do not mean only the Ministries or
other big public organizations, but above all small Municipalities also
with a few hundred inhabitants, whose technicians begin to see the
possibility of using for many subjects no longer the CAD but (Q)GIS.
During the Central Italy 2016 Earthquake, we installed QGIS in more than
200 Municipalities, in order to manage the complex phase of post-earthquake
surveys of private buildings.
Well, I assure you that if QGIS had been only in English, the chances that
the technicians and volunteers would use QGIS, would have been very low.
The fact that the default language in QGIS is the local one is a
consolation and safety for the user.

2) matteo ghetta, paolo cavallini and I are the coordinators of the Italian
translation team. There are more than 60 people registered in Transifex,
but there are very few active ones.
The work flow is this: anyone can translate, but only one is the reviewer
(me). This helps to have a unique (or almost) translation style and allows
revisions and corrections on strings to spread immediately over all the
other similar ones in the various versions of QGIS available.
This is the reason why I don't like having strings of versions 3.4 and 3.8
in Transifex: I work on "All resources" and therefore when I make massive
corrections I have errors due to the presence of these strings that are no
longer editable.

3) In Italy the interest in the translation of QGIS (GUI, site and
documentation) is high; As part of summer webinars organized by the
GFOSS.it association, on July 9 I will hold a short webinar on tricks and
good practices for translating in Transifex and about twenty people have
already registered.

In conclusion, I believe that although there are sometimes obvious errors
in the translations that make the string incomprehensible, it is necessary
to persevere and continue to improve and push users to report errors or
omissions.
The choice of a single reviewer greatly limits the possibility of errors,
even if the various evolutions of the resources of QGIS in Transifex has
led to having thousands of strings that had already been revised to be
again unreviewed, frustrating the work of months.
But that's okay; Transifex is exceptional even if it is hateful not to have
the context in which the string is used.
And please don't make English the default language.

thank you and forgive my Italianglish: when I translate QGIS from English
to Italian I am more accurate :-D

s.

Il giorno mar 30 giu 2020 alle ore 00:20 Alexandre Neto <
senhor.neto at gmail.com> ha scritto:

> Transifex Webtranslation page for QGIS is on
> https://www.transifex.com/qgis/
>
> Hi,
>
> I have been looking into the Portuguese translations of the GUI and the
> Docs, and I got really scared. Many translations were done completely out
> of context, making it very hard to read or understand what was
> originally written in English, even if you are familiar with the
> terminology.
>
> I don't know how other languages are going, and if you face the same
> problems. In Portugal, we have a very small community. Because of that,
> translation efforts are not really coordinated or even reviewed in most
> cases.
>
> Now, the biggest problem is that I think this deeply affects QGIS
> credibility. When you install QGIS, it defaults to the machine's locale,
> and many users don't even know how to change it (seen it in several
> courses). This means that many people will only know the badly translated
> version of QGIS in their native language... and It looks bad.
>
> In training, people sometimes make fun of the translations. I always
> enforce the idea that the translation work is fully done by volunteers in
> their spare time, but I am afraid if for some people it just looks like the
> full application was done by volunteers and hobbyists.
>
> So, I wanted to know if more of you face the same issues. If so, would it
> be wiser to default the language always to English and let the user find
> out how to change to his language if he wants to?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alexandre Neto
>
> PS: Sorry for the cross-posting
>
>
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