Talk:QW2021/Programme

Marked for translation

@Pols12: Thanks for marking this for translation. A couple of questions, though:

1. Why did you make the table headers be separate variables, rather than using the same 4 strings for each of the 4 tables? Is how I marked that up wrong for doing that?
2. Why did you mark up the timestamps for translation? We don't want "15:30 UTC" marking for translation, surely? It should stay with the UTC time, so that the link can handle timezone conversion — "UTC" is a non-language term that doesn't get translated.

Thanks again! — OwenBlacker (Talk) 16:21, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

@OwenBlacker:

1. A translation unit cannot appear more than once on a page. As far as I remember, the system just doesn’t let you mark the page for translation as long as there are duplicates, but even if it doesn’t, it causes troubles.
2. When a language’s speakers mainly come from a given region (as is the case for most languages), why don’t allow translators to add the local time in addition to the UTC one? Why force readers to visit an external website, which is not even available in their language, only in English? Also, some languages may not use Western Arabic numerals and want to use their own numerals. Or just a different time format—for example, it’s not until recently that “15:30” became a valid spelling of the time in Hungarian, a few years ago still only “15.30” (with a dot instead of a colon) was accepted.

—Tacsipacsi (talk) 11:25, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi:

1. Ah, that makes sense. Frustrating, but makes sense.
2. For most languages likely to be attending, the speakers are gonna be widely distributed (across English-speaking and Spanish-speaking nations, in particular). Also, marking the times for translations means we can't change them — like I just did. Given the working language of the days is going to be English, in this circumstance at least, it's reasonable to assume everyone can understand that time format.

We'll be running a bigger conference next year, hopefully in-person, where that 2nd point might not be a reasonable assumption, so I'll bear it in mind for then. Thank you for pointing it out 😊 — OwenBlacker (Talk) 11:34, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

@OwenBlacker: I consider the approach “this page will be translated only to languages X, Y and Z” quite inappropriate. Yes, there are languages the page is more likely to be translated into, but nothing prevents translators from translating into any other supported language (unless a translation administrator specifically restricts the target languages, but there should be a very good reason to do so). And making times translatable doesn’t prevent changing them in any way—translatable pieces can be marked as outdated when they change, urging translators to re-translate them, but in this case, the former translation units can simply be dropped and new ones created so that the English ones appear until someone re-translates them. If you expect that readers understand English anyway, then why is this page translatable in the first place? However, if it is, then it should be really and fully translatable, including times. (P.S. Please change your signature so that it includes at least one link to your user, user talk or contributions page on Meta; otherwise the system doesn’t recognize it as a signature, so for example I didn’t get a notification about your ping.) —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:57, 9 May 2021 (UTC)