[Mageia-discuss] What is your motivation? (about American English in Mageia for British users)

[Marja van Waes]

Hi Graham,

At least two of my fellow Mageia contributors posted a reply to your 
blog more than a day ago. Those replies are still not visible. That 
gives me a very uncomfortable feeling.

If you want to reply to this mail, then please reply to the 
mageia-discuss mailing list after becoming a member of it.
https://www.mageia.org/mailman/listinfo/mageia-discuss

Mageia installer and the Mageia tools are written in perl. About perl 
someone told me, that it is a very powerful language and that usually 
only the person who wrote a program in it will understand his own lines 
of code, *unless* he sees them again years later. In the last case, 
he'll look in amazement at some of the lines he wrote himself and wonder 
what he wanted to achieve with them.

Over a year ago, one of our brightest developers spent hours together 
with an English proofreader, to correct some sentences in the code of 
one or more drak*-programs. He wasn't aware that in doing so, he was 
breaking all the translations of the sentences he corrected. So making 
the changes you propose isn't as easy as you think.

The developer of those draktools and of the DVD installer has too little 
free time to do all the work that is waiting for him here, so he 
focusses on what is most urgent. At the moment, over 130 bugs are 
waiting for him to get solved, among them are crashes and other very 
serious problems.

Kind regards,
Marja



On 24/07/2012 13:18, Graham Tarn wrote:
> Hello Marja
>
> I understand and I see the problem of shortage of contributors.
> Also I can see that you are doing your best.
>
> However, my language is under attack from a variety of sources in the
> computing world (no other industries try to change the spelling of the
> words in my language, only the computing industry, and the problem lies
> with operating systems and applications),
>
> As a start, I am asking for changes of spelling to any of the following
> occurrennces:
>
> center --> centre
> initialize --> initialise
> favorite --> favourite
> favorites --> favourites
> color --> colour
> colors --> colours
> flavor --> flavour
> flavors --> flavours
>
> This is not a long list and it should not need a team .
> How many maintainers do you need to change "Center" to "Centre"?
>
> Kind regards
>
> Graham
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Marja van Waes <marja11 at xs4all.nl>
> *To:* Graham Tarn <gtarn at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at googlemail.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, July 22, 2012 8:06 PM
> *Subject:* Re: What is your motivation? (about American English in
> Mageia for British users)
>
> On 22/07/2012 20:03, Graham Tarn wrote:
>  > With regard to making British users of Mageia use a Menu in American
>  > English, which for some young British users, will have adverse
>  > consequences on their understanding and use of their own language, I
>  > should be pleased to hear your reasons for doing so and ask you to
>  > reconsider.
>  >
>  > See http://parsectraveller.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/mageia-language-bug/
>  >
>  > Yours sincerely
>  >
>  > gtarn
>
> About: bug report: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6069
> which was closed as duplicate of
> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1793
>
> Hi Graham,
>
> Mageia is made by volunteers who do this in their spare time.
>
> Of course we would like to make Mageia available in every flavour of
> every language on earth. However, there are not only many translators
> needed to achieve that, but also packagers and developers, people who
> know how to get those translations where they should go, so that you'll
> see the correct translation when using your system.
>
> The real problem is shortage of contributors.
>
> Kind regards,
> Marja
>
> CC: Oliver, the leader of i18n (translators' team)
>
>