English is Debian's de-facto language -- all of our developers have at
least some proficiency it it, and all are required to create English
documents, such as package descriptions, man pages, debconf templates,
README.Debian files, and so on. But we're not all native English
speakers, and sometimes it shows.
While I am not proficient enough in any other language to check for sure,
I suspect that the overall of the translations that exist in other languages
are often of higher and more consistent quality than much of the text they
translate[1]. After all, many of these English texts are themselves
translations from the original in the native language of the author.
What I am proposing is a new list, similar in scope to the other l10n
lists, where developers can bring text they need a clean English version
of (be the original in some other language, or their best try in
English), and get a good English translation back.
I'm offline so I'm not sure what a proper list name would be, probably
either debian-english or debian-i18n-english, or debian-l10n-english or
whatever parallels the other lists for other language translations.
--
see shy jo
[1] Of course, it often goes the other way too. Easy to make a bad
translation..
