hi translators, This is my opinion on a topic that I don't know a lot about. I think I'm right, but I'd like feedback.
I recently noticed this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612698 While I agree with the fact that it is wrong to have "MB" meaning anything other than "1 million bytes", I disagree with the idea that translation is an appropriate means by which to fix this problem. I also noticed a similar problem in the Canadian English translations at one point -- lots of silly things like "can not" being changed to "cannot". Translation should attempt to best-preserve what was said by the person who said it -- not what they might have said if they had a different opinion on a topic (like the way in which units should be used). It doesn't matter if this opinion is wrong -- that should be filed as a bug and fixed in the source strings. Doing this in translations only fixes the problem for a small subset of the users. There's also another problem with this approach. Taking the "MB"/"MiB" example: if an application were incorrectly using "MB" to mean "1048576 bytes" then a translator may feel justified in translating it to "MiB". Meanwhile, a bug could be filed against that application to change their incorrect usage of "MB". When that app makes the change, "MB" now means 1000000. The translation, however, will still be converting "MB" to "MiB", so we have a situation where "MiB" means 1000000 bytes, which is just totally insane. This is not theoretical -- this very case occurred in GLib for quite some languages and the bug report I linked to above is discussing doing it in file-roller where I notice that the Spanish and Norwegian Nynorsk translations have already done the same. TL;DR: If you disagree with how something is written in the English string, please file a bug against the relevant component. Never use translation as a way to 'fix' bugs or change something that you disagree with. Cheers _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n