[vlc-devel] commit: l10n: Initial Walloon translation ( Ga??tan Rousseaux )

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le samedi 31 octobre 2009 23:07:24 jpd at videolan.org, vous avez écrit :
> On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 08:06:01PM +0100, git version control wrote:
> > vlc | branch: 1.0-bugfix | Ga??tan Rousseaux <garousseau at voo.be> | [...]
> >
> > l10n: Initial Walloon translation
> >
> > Not activated yet as only ~5% translated
> 
> I was wondering: Wouldn't it be a good idea to use the french
> translation as a basis for this one, updating it to more specific
> walloon as you go?

Sounds like a bad idea. First, that scheme would only work the first time, and 
fail miserably if the French localization is updated. Second, it would 
obfuscate which strings was translated and which wasn't.

Of course, you can question the usefulness of dialectal localizations. They 
take up disk space for typically tiny minorities for everybody. Among those 
minorities, people might not even know they can get VLC in their language. 
Those translations are usually not kept as up-to-date as mainstream ones. And 
last, they make VLC linguistically inconsistent with the rest of the system -  
most probably that is translated in a more mainstream language (e.g. one 
supported by Red Hat/Canonical/Apple/Microsoft/...) if not in English.

Of course, I don't have any statistics, let alone accurate ones, except for 
that one: ISO 639-3 has 7704 languages.  So I won't propose a policy on this. 
But that's what it comes down to... language politics.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/