Community vs. Quality
At Babel we’re trying to solve the Localization of Eclipse problem with a community approach, where anyone can help translate Eclipse. However, a recurring concern (shared amongst commercial entities) is the quality of the translations, as they are not being done by professional translators.
As I was casually testing a new Babel feature, I stumbled upon this message, in English, that I was attempting to translate to French:
The Bundle-NativeCode file {0} could not be not found
An innocent mistake, really, but considering this has been in CVS for almost 2 1/2 years, I began wondering why the professional translators haven’t spotted this. Or perhaps even worse, the pros simply translated the string as per their requirement and didn’t bother to go the extra mile to have this fixed. I did.
So there we have it… Babel is enabling community-driven translations, and we’re make the English version of Eclipse even better in the process.
Posted July 23rd, 2008 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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6 Responses to “Community vs. Quality”
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Wayne Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Did you consider that maybe they wanted to not find the Bundle_NativeCode file?
Double negatives make my head hurt…
Chris Aniszczyk (zx) Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I’m surprised that’s the only find so far!
Denis Roy Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Wayne, good point. I hadn’t never not considered that.
Denis Roy Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Here’s another one:
http://bugs.eclipse.org/241975
Karl Matthias Says:
July 25th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I like that “we’re make the English version of Eclipse even better”.
All your base are belong to us!
Sean Says:
July 29th, 2008 at 2:45 am
I had to look at the cvs diff before I could see what the problem was. Duplicated words can be hard to spot!
But even so, yes, you would think someone would have spotted it in 2 1/2 years.
I think this is a symptom of the fact that it’s harder than it should be to submit a textual correction. (Not just to Eclipse, this is nigh-universal.) Submitting a trivial bug can be a pretty painful process compared to, say, correcting a printout in red ink.
Maybe there’s a potential Babel feature in this. Something that submits English text corrections at the press of a button. (And ideally, someone at the other end of the pipeline just presses a button to merge the change into the .properties file once they have reviewed it.)