Hi Massimo and all those who concern about app admin's i18n, App admin's i18n translation quality deteriorates from time to time. Problems are:
P1: Volunteer translators somehow forgot to translate a sentence. This results in the original english sentense displaying as empty in the target language interface. For example, Revision: b2213f5013 's zh- cn.py incorrectly discard old translation for the sentence "these files are served without processing, your images go here". It happened before. https://groups.google.com/group/web2py/msg/3275f693facd1cd0 P2: Volunteer translators from adjacent but not exactly same areas might not notice the subtle difference between their language zones. For example, the Chinese in zh-cn, zh-hk, zh-tw, zh-sg are not fully identical. But recent zh-cn.py mixed up with both mandarin and cantonese slangs. I guess that is because contributor Jobinson is a cantonese (me too), and Zoom (I know him well) speaks native mandarin. :-) P3: Some are just simply bad translation. For example, in Chinese, unlike the English, there is no plural at all, so you just can not translate "models" as "模型s" (that means "model" plus "s"). (Above conclusion is drew from recent change to web2py's chinese translation, but I assume other translations contain more or less the same problems too.) Obviously Massimo don't know every kind of languages, and he doesn't have to, so he is not the one to blame. As a systematic approach, I suggest we assign only one language editor for each language file. He (or she) is responsible to review every new translation to admin/ languages/his-prefer-language.py, BEFORE its being committed. This can address problem #1 and #3. And we need different volunteers for different sub-languages. This addresses problem #2. If Massimo gonna maintian a editor-for-language list, feel free to count me as zh-cn editor. Sincerely, Iceberg, A trilingual in Mandarin, Cantonese, English. 2010-Apr-29
