GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 346779
Warning and error messages are marked for translations
Last modified: 2007-04-11 01:30:53 UTC
Currently almost all of the error and warning messages which are meant for displaying in console are marked as translatable. This puts too much burden for translators as some of the messages are hard to understand even for people whose native language is English.
See bug 335720 comment 12 for why this was done. Since we have apparently had conflicting requests from translators, someone should probably bring this up on gnome-i18n@ and get one of the GTP spokespersons to comment on this bug and declare The Way Forward.
Ok, time to start re-considering this ;) As per bug 362855, bug-buddy is planning to support including the messages from g_error and friends that appear on the console and are stored in ~/.xsession-errors... This has some problems: a) It makes maintainers work harder to understand what exactly was reported, when they get these messages in 200 different (ok, ~50 for now ;)) languages. b) Most of these messages are not visible anyway. c) ...and of course - less is more. (Unmarking these messages can automatically give ~5% boost for some languages) ;)
Error/warning messages like these are mostly targeting developers, and getting translated versions of these in a bug report doesn't help the developer (and likely not the user either, since these warnings are typically code-centered). IMHO translating these strings is a waste of time for the translators, and will lead to harder to debug bugs.
Created attachment 75564 [details] [review] metacity-l10n-meta_warning.patch Removes _( ) from some of the meta_warning messages. Messages I left translatable were related to metacity dieing, so they would be visible... The whole warning system needs to be rethought, as we have: meta_topic_real() meta_warning() meta_bug() meta_fatal() g_set_error()
(In reply to comment #3) > Error/warning messages like these are mostly targeting developers, and getting > translated versions of these in a bug report doesn't help the developer (and > likely not the user either, since these warnings are typically code-centered). > > IMHO translating these strings is a waste of time for the translators, and will > lead to harder to debug bugs. The rule of thumb that I would recommend is indeed: 1) Error/warning messages that are only targeted at developers (i.e. code-centric messages, possibly referring to internal loops and methods) should *not* be marked for translation. It can be assumed that all developers are sufficiently fluent in English that this should not be a problem. 2) Error/warning messages that might be of relevance to systems administrators and the like (i.e. technical people, but not developers in the strict sense) *should* be marked for translation. It should be assumed that not all people in this category all over the world are very fluent in English.
A lot of the warnings that are un-translated in this patch seem potentially useful to an admin or shell-proficient user to me; e.g. "gconf key set to junk" or "here is the problem with this theme file you are developing" or whatever... Regarding the kinds of warning: meta_topic - this is pure verbose debug spew, should never be translated meta_warning - this is usually used for stuff that _could_ be user-interesting I think, though sometimes it's pretty technical, it's all "something weird going on for the following reason" messages, not "debug spew" meta_bug - fatal bug in the WM - should not happen - translating probably never appropriate meta_fatal - fatal runtime error (not a bug, but broken situation) - translating probably is appropriate though it may well be a very technical problem g_set_error - doesn't print anything at all, this is an "exception" - many of which might be user-interesting, if they get printed out later, but some may not be
So, reading over the guidance from Christian and Havoc and looking over the strings marked for translation in the code, it looks like we're already doing this correctly.