Dear Debian fellows, In France, we have an expression that says "a storm in a glass of water". I sincerely think we are in such a case.
Let me summarise what happened, according to what I read on the debian-l10-french list. Once, there was a description for the Apache package using a long coma-separated list for the apache modules both in the original description and in the French translation. Then, the apache maintainers changed the description only changing the PHP3 in PHP. What bother Fabio Massimo is that the new French translation goes further and also changes the layout of the module list. I'm sure being a package maintainer is like taking care of a baby and, as a good father, you feel very concerned even with the translations of your baby. This honours you but... Fabio Massimo, you say : > Yes we are [unhappy with the new translation since in the first place we > asked nicely to change the layout > back to the original one (as it was before this translation) and then you > jumped in with some fancy reasons and even after 3/4 attempts to explain > to you why the layout has to be changed back you were not able to > understand them, I'm sorry, but you never explained - at least on the french l10n list - why the layout of the translation had to be changed. You only said that the maintainers are responsible of the layout and that you dislike the new one so it has to be changed. Dear maintainers, are the layouts of the translations so important? Maybe sometimes a strange layout can cause technical problems for its displaying, but I don't think coma-separated list vs. itemised list worth the fight. Furthermore, theses mails rise the problem of conflicts between maintainers and translators about translations. I am not a real Debian translator (do I loose all credibility for what I said before? ;-). I'm just a proof-reader. I agree that the English version of a Debian document should be the "official" one, because it's expected to be understood by most people. But when you have to translate a text, you are facing two sorts of problems: the specific requirements of your language (like non-breaking spaces in French) and the "in my language, we'd rather say this in that way". Thus, if we want to make a _good_ translation, and I'm sure everybody wants it here, we often have to make large changes in the translation. I can tell you that we are making big effort to be sure not to pervert the initial sense of the text. Is it a problem? Shouldn't the maintainers be confident in the translators and their work? I'm sure we are here to walk together to make Debian a good (well, in fact a better, it's yet very good) distribution. So lets not make a storms in glass of water. Communautairement, (fellowshiply ?) Yannick
