What do we need to translate Calc?

[two]

formulas are shown as 100% translated to ukrainian, but they are mostly just copied english strings:

afaik microsoft excel’s formulas are not translated into ukrainian either. what should we do? should we just edit it? or should we wait for excel to translate the formulas first for libreoffice to be compatible with it?

[mikekaganski]

Just don’t translate them, and enjoy the great power of international formulas. It is up to a localization team, to decide to translate or not no translate; two useful points are:

1. Untranslated formulas allow to get formulas from the most complete source of formulas - which is English pages over the net;
2. Following what Excel does for this language - this allows (a) to have the second largest source for the formulas - the localized web pages for Excel; and (b) to share the formulas easily with colleagues using Excel. This, by the way, means that the translation should follow Excel names.

Other strategies may look appealing, but in fact will do more harm to millions of users, than will do good to those couple of people who felt proud to make the localization. And the names will be no more clear to the local users, anyway. See e.g. Russian localized function names (following Excel), and try to make sense of those abbreviations - those names are just abracadabra for most users, no less than English names even for people who don’t know English. Trying to support users, when the function names may be localized, or may be not, is a double pain.

[two]

@mikekaganski

See e.g. Russian localized function names (following Excel), and try to make sense of those abbreviations - those names are just abracadabra for most users, no less than English names even for people who don’t know English.

yes, but a lot of ukrainians still use those russian formulas, because they are easier to learn than english

[two]

also a very annoying thing when using english formulas is that you have to switch the keyboard layout all the time between typing text and a formula

[mikekaganski]

@two

because they are easier to learn than english

I believe that the only thing that makes it easier to learn is the learning materials in the language that you know. Possibly there are many sources in Ukrainian, using those names, which makes it easier to learn. Otherwise, ВПР is no better for a Russian (and I bet, for an Ukrainian, too) than VLOOKUP (well, it’s shorter, but for most other cases, the opposite is true). Well, then you would likely want to use the translation from Russian version - unless you would want risking introduce another variant of formulas, with a chance that when MS translates the Ukrainian version, you have completely separate set of names…

But I tell from my own experience, that the the best translation is no translation. We had our translation in v.5.3, and it was a headache ever since. Only the layout switch argument makes a bit of sense…