[bt-devel] retranslateUi

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, Jaak Ristioja wrote:

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> On 27.01.2010 13:57, Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> > On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, Jaak Ristioja wrote:
> > Does "one might want to change" mean that we know some people really
> > want to do it, or just that we feel it's a possible scenario? A
> > possibility isn't enough to warrant a change in every class.
> I've been in such a scenario a number of times. Mainly because the translation was so bad,
> I wanted to change it to English.

Then you need to change it only once or twice, and "after restart"
shouldn't be too much.

> Other times I needed to change the language for the
> whole application at runtime because I either wanted to see whether the Estonian
> translation is usable

If that's done by an ordinary end user, it's needed only once or twice.
If by a UI translator, that's a special case (at the moment a dozen or
so people who have been happy without it before and could use "after
restart" almost as easily).

> or the application did not for some reason start up using the
> correct language.

That's a bug somewhere, either in the app or in the system, and we don't
have to support that.

> Messing with environment variables is not comfortable, especially on
> Windows. Using environment variables is not an option in many other cases, e.g. when
> installing BibleTime on many machines like done in enterprise environments.
>
> Most importantly - the average computer user has no idea what environment variables are.
> We know, but to the average Joe its nuclear science.
>

Let's remember that we don't have to even discuss about adding GUI for
translation change. The question is about "after restart" or
"on-the-fly". The latter means changing every class, which is the point
in the whole discussion. I have said long time ago that I agree about
adding the GUI for that feature, but that it's better to do it "after
restart" first. Afterwards it can very easily (except the retranslateUi
methods) be changed to "on-the-fly"  if we all agree on that.


> I'm certain that implementing on-the-fly translation will keep users happier than
> translation on restart. Restarting the application to change the translation will require
> more (effort + time) from the end-users.
>
> Yes, of course "quite a lot" is subjective, but I don't think we should start to count and
> calculate these percentages.

But I would like to see even some hard fact which proves that it's worth
the effort. Of course "on-the-fly" is better, but the question is, is it
actually worth it? It's not adding a dozen of lines somewhere - it means
changing every UI class. Would any user ever feel that BibleTime is
worse than some other application because it has ONLY "after restart"
language changing? Would any user actually feel it's better because it
does it on-the-fly? I believe not. And if yes, it would be maybe 0.1% of
our user base, and even they could still use the software for all tasks.

  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)