Translation credits

[Jannick Kuhr]

Am Donnerstag, 10. Mai 2007 schrieb Og Maciel:
> I'm going to be very frank here...  This whole thing about quantifying
> one's contribution with translation is such a waste of time!  Every
> little thing helps: one well placed period, comma, or changing the
> tense of a verb could turn your completely translated string into a
> well, concise and intelligent sentence!  If one is concerned about
> credits, maybe one should rethink about what open source means.  This
> is not about a contest of who did what.  This is about people doing
> volunteering work to help out the community.
>
> Please let's not waste any more time on this subject.  ALL
> contributions deserve to be mentioned, no matter how minute.

Dear Og Maciel,

I respect your very radical position regarding this issue. Your are absolutly 
right if you state that open soure lives by the contributions of everyone - 
independently how big the contribution is. It has never been my intention to 
doubt this. But I also think that open discussions about issues like this are 
an important part of the open source movement. And I think it would not be a 
good idea to terminate this discussion at this point.

My proposal is to handle the translator credits like they are handled by the 
upstream teams. I know for example that the german KDE translation team 
generally only mentions translators who translated a big part of the program 
or  who are the actual maintainer of the translation, but not all the 
translators who corrected strings. If (K/X/Ed)Ubuntu introduced an other 
policy regarding the translator credits than the appropriate translation 
teams, this would result in an imbalance between the upstream and Ubuntu 
translators in the translator credits, which would surely annoy upstream 
translators.

To prevent such unnecessary problems, I would recommend to ask the different 
upstream teams how they  normally handle this issue and find a similar 
solution.

Kind regards, Jannick Kuhr

Btw. you don't have to CC me. I always follow this list ;-)