Getting a user barred from a language

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
From what people are saying i think he does speak Gaelic but just very badly.  If he were in a social setting people would be either;
1.   trying not to laugh at him or 

2.   offended at other things he might say

If he got really lucky then people might be kind enough to try to help him find the right words, as they might with a child, but in a lot of other pubs he might be lucky to get out intact.  



Either way people are more likely to notice all the mistakes and tell their friends about how awful the translations are.  If there were only around 1% bad then it would be that 1% that people would talk about.  They would ignore the 99% that was good.  In some ways that might not be such a bad thing because at least people would be talking about Ubuntu and Mint more but if i worked as hard as the rest of you i would be upset  if they were only talking about it in a derogatory way.  


So, i think we don't have to be perfect but generally we try to improve things rather than make them worse.  How do we deal with someone doing the opposite and making them worse?  



I'm actually kinda squirming right now because when i first joined Ubuntu i kinda dived into doing translations into English (Uk) without having much of a clue what i was doing.  The interface was very pretty so it was almost like playing an arcade game.  When it was clear that context was crucial i tried to avoid action but even so, looking back on it now, i must have been a bit of a pain for the Uk team.  


In some ways i believe that any translation, even if it's only done by a Machine Translator (such as Google translate), is better than no translation.  Hopefully, errors might drive people into joining in to do better translations.  That was what motivated me when i started trying to help.  A few times i had noticed "Americanisms" in the Uk.  Way over 99% of Uk was perfect so it felt like i could make a big impact with only a little work.  

However, starting badly and then getting better is much less exasperating than what is being described.  Putting a lot of work in only to find the quality going downhill must be a total nightmare.  


In some ways it sounds like a classic nightmare race.  If the good members of the team could "get ahead" then maybe Alex would not be able to be so prolific.  However, that would be tough because it would mean abandoning the corrections of his work and somehow finding a way of being able to return to those later.  

Also it means Alex would determine the tempo and it's likely that bad fragments would crop up through the remaining work and that the rest of the team would be working at times when they really should be resting or spending time with family etc.  

Plus i get the impression that Alex is somehow managing to change good translations for bad ones so it might not be possible to "get ahead of him" because it might be difficult to guess what he is going to "stuff-up" next.  

Regards from 
Tom :)





________________________________
 From: Hannie Dumoleyn <lafeber-dumoleyn2 at zonnet.nl>

<snip />

>
On LP I see: There are 2 direct members of the "Sgioba Ubuntu na
Gàidhlig"/"Sgioba Launchpad na Gàidhlig" team (moderated), both with
administrator status. When I look at the introduction of the owner's
personal page I cannot believe he/she does not speak a word of Gaelic.
Hannie
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-translators/attachments/20130912/9812078c/attachment.html>