Hi,
Kees mentioned today that he saw another project that modified its makefile to only install translations that were at least XX%. The idea being to avoid installing really poor quality translations. Do you guys think that'd be worthwhile to do for Inkscape too?
IMHO translation ratio is not enough to judge the value of a translation. A very important question is: which strings are translated. If someone doesn't translate esoteric stuff like extensions, Inkboard, command line options etc, his translation can still be of value to us. To really judge things, we must actually take a look (switch the locale to the language in question, launch Inkscape and look around).
We could also go the GIMP way: separate the less important stuff into another PO file -- this way translation ratios could be enough for deciding about quality.
Alternatively, I know many of our translations are unmaintained since Sodipodi days, and the percent translated for many are very low (under 10%). Is it at all worthwhile to have these files in our codebase? If they are of no true use, why don't we just eliminate them entirely?
For certain people (me included) it's easier to edit/correct an existing text than to start from scratch. Moreover, it can be motivating for some potential translators to see a bad quality translation (again, I'm a good example for this -- YMMV).
IMHO we should keep the translations available, but only compile those translations to binary format (MO) that were touched lately by the translator and meet the above mentioned criteria (visual test or percentage).
Arpad Biro
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