Re: [Kdei18n-pl-devel] The „Zaniechaj” vs „Anuluj” problem

[Michał D. <mic...@gm...>]

Hi, I'm Michał Dybczak and I'm just a quiet observer or I was till now. 
I'm also an average Plasma users for ca. 5 years.

I noticed the change of translation between "Anuluj" and "Zaniechaj" 
right away after some update many months ago. I was confused and angry 
at first but I kinda got use to it, but I still don't like 
it."Poniechaj" would be a complete disaster as this word is incredibly 
rarely used. One could say it's not a modern Polish anymore. I can't 
even remember when I saw or heard "Poniechaj" the last time. I would 
rather expect my grandma to use it but not a young person. Seeing it in 
the OS would be a shock and not a pleasant one. So Zaniechaj is bad, but 
Poniechaj is a catastrophe.

Here are the points I want to raise:


1. Community

KDE is a community driven project so huge and strongly affecting changes 
should be always consulted with the community and never decided by the 
one person. The switch from Anuluj to Zaniechaj is one of such basic and 
strongly affecting changes that cannot be left to one person.

In this case a simple pool could be an answer. It would have to be 
active for several months at least as the change is not time sensitive.

Were there any issues raised with the usage of Anuluj? What was the 
reason for the change?

So far we have a community uproar, general dissatisfaction and annoyance 
because of that change.  We can see this in this bug report:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404286

It's good to remember that most people don't know how to use 
bugtrackers, nor they even know that they exist in the first place so 
only a small percentage of community raised their voice about it. I also 
wasn't aware of that thread till recently.

I recently learned that there is not much community around translation 
packages. I hope this could be changed. I'll ask around, maybe there 
could be an article presenting how to join or help with translation. 
Also the incoming switch to Gitlab is a good opportunity to join it. 
Mailing list are obsolete and hard to use (where to join, at which email 
to post, how is the development work done, etc.).


2. KDE philosophy

Simple by default, powerful when needed.

That statement is a nice one but it's more a wishful thinking. KDE 
software is so powerful and full of options that it's never simple by 
default, no matter what we do. There is simply too many options and 
differences in comparison to other environments or OSes. However, we can 
strive for it to be more intuitive, welcoming and that is the core point 
of that philosophy.

As Albert Astals noticed, "we're not here to create new terminology" or 
in other words, KDE is not like Gnome where we introduce new solutions 
against community. KDE was always presenting a very classical, Windows 
alike setup to implement familiarity. KDE introduce new things, options, 
tools and by improving and fine tuning things, not by introducing alien 
concepts. It's anyway hard to learn and find your way out among so many 
options for newbies. We should avoid creating usage frictions without 
extremely important reason.


without extremely important reason.
3. Confusion

There is enough friction and learning curve for new users. Changing 
Cancel to Zaniechaj is another part of creating that friction and 
confusion for the new users.

Cancel as Anuluj is been established for over 20 years now, everyone 
understands it and this is de facto a technical standard language that 
affects every user. It's not about being linguistically correct. It's 
about wording that is familiar and widely understood by almost all 
users. Zaniechaj might only appeal to some completely new, old and non 
technical users who never had any prior experience with computers but 
that is an incredibly small niche.

Besides, seeing Zaniechaj for Cancel and Zastosuj for Apply, two words 
starting with Z can lead to easy mistakes. Having two distinctly written 
words is simply better and clearer on the long run.

In the end, aa...@kd... Albert Astals Cid worded it perfectly:

"(...) we need to use the terms they know and expect."

I join to the request to change the translation back. I can no longer be 
silent because the current translation is opposing the KDE spirit and 
creating unnecessary problems and is against KDE spirit. Such details 
matter so let's bring back the familiar and comprehensive Anuluj. 20+ 
years is enough to create a strong usage case for a word.

Hopefully, the community will become more active because of this issue, 
because it was standing too long on shoulders of few people. Their work 
is huge and rarely appreciated, so if we want to make change, we must 
take action ourselves.

Thank you


Michał Dybczak