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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Polish localization of Linux sucks

The ducks from CuteOverload, as usual.
And unless we do something about it it's going to suck forever. And as long as localizations suck, we'll never be able to fix Bug #1.

In the last few years some things got fixed about i18n - all sane distros use UTF-8 only, have fonts that cover most of the world preinstalled (including CJK), and contain packages with input method switch (scim).

What is needed now is:
  • Instant feedback mechanism - when the translation sucks, the user should be able to correct it easily and submit it upstream as easily. This requires some serious changes in i18n infrastructure, but there is no way we'll be able to have quality localizations to hundreds of languages without instant feedback.
  • Consistency of the translation (like not using "Skopiuj" form half of the time in place of "Kopiuj").
  • Quality check - the translations are often plain wrong. Wrong is worse than unlocalized.
  • Translation of everything. Everything. If something is not translated, it should be considered a serious bug.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I consider lack of your blog's localization a bug ;p

taw said...

Yeah, it's a bug. I blame Blogger for it. LiveJournal seems to be much more localizable.