Closed Bug 1461569 Opened 6 years ago Closed 6 years ago

[ja] Drop or update en-US dictionary in Japanese builds

Categories

(Mozilla Localizations :: ja / Japanese, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: flod, Unassigned)

References

Details

Since bug 374036, Japanese is shipping with an en-US dictionary by default.
https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/ja/file/8a3cbe6dfd2e/extensions/spellcheck/hunspell

Also, from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374036#c19

> A reminder: in the future, we have to maintain the 
> dictionary manually when the original one has been updated.

Unfortunately, that never happened. There is one update in 2012, but hard to tell where it comes from.

The reason for adding the dictionary was:

> The English dictionary comes with Thunderbird 1.5. 
> Japanese users might be confused if Thunderbird 2 
> won't have the dictionary.

That doesn't seem like a good reason for shipping the en-US dictionary, by default, to all Japanese users and in all Gecko products.

I think there are two options:
1) Stop shipping the en-US dictionary
2) Update the en-US dictionary, and keep it in sync with the one available in mozilla-central

I'd like to understand the reasons for doing 2), given that we have plenty of tier 1 languages shipping without a dictionary by default (de, es-ES, it, zh-CN to name a few), and I'm not sure there's an actual need for the Japanese market to have English installed, compared to those markets.

If the reason for shipping a default dictionary is that spell checking is hardly discoverable without one, I would argue that's a product problem, and should be fixed in the product.
Actually, ja build bundles en-US as default.

> I'd like to understand the reasons for doing 2), given that we have plenty of tier 1 languages shipping without a dictionary by default (de, es-ES, it, zh-CN to name a few), and I'm not sure there's an actual need for the Japanese market to have English installed, compared to those markets.

As long as I read previous bug, I cannot make sense this comment too.  Yoshino-san, what does it mean?
Flags: needinfo?(kohei.yoshino)
(In reply to Francesco Lodolo [:flod] from comment #0)
> > A reminder: in the future, we have to maintain the 
> > dictionary manually when the original one has been updated.
> 
> Unfortunately, that never happened. There is one update in 2012, but hard to
> tell where it comes from.

Definitely, the update was from en-US repo (Gecko 18.0).
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-beta/ja/rev/70401835979d
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/db9dc0e94815


I don't understand why we have to stop shipping en-US dictionary.
Just update it.
(In reply to Masahiko Imanaka [:marsf] from comment #2)
> I don't understand why we have to stop shipping en-US dictionary.
> Just update it.

What's the reason to ship an en-US dictionary in the first place? As said

> I'd like to understand the reasons for doing 2), given that we have plenty
> of tier 1 languages shipping without a dictionary by default (de, es-ES, it,
> zh-CN to name a few), and I'm not sure there's an actual need for the
> Japanese market to have English installed, compared to those markets.
> 
> If the reason for shipping a default dictionary is that spell checking is
> hardly discoverable without one, I would argue that's a product problem, and
> should be fixed in the product.
1. Currently, Japanese spell check dictionary that we can use is not exist.

2. English is the first place foreign language in Japan to communicate with foreign people.
Other language has not been learn until college or high school (and it may elective subject).

3. Japanese language and other tier 1 languages (en, de, es-ES, it, zh-CN) are so different. It may hard to learn.

Characters:
  ja: Ideogram / Phonogram
  other: Phonogram

Language type:
  ja: agglutinative
  other: inflectional (en, de, es-ES, it), isolating language (zh-CN)

4. Intended languages in the most OS (or application) for Japanese edition are Japanese and English.

5. We are using English here. :)


Please correct me, if they are not.
(In reply to Masahiko Imanaka [:marsf] from comment #4)
> 1. Currently, Japanese spell check dictionary that we can use is not exist.
> 
> 2. English is the first place foreign language in Japan to communicate with
> foreign people.
> Other language has not been learn until college or high school (and it may
> elective subject).
> 
> 3. Japanese language and other tier 1 languages (en, de, es-ES, it, zh-CN)
> are so different. It may hard to learn.

I don't really understand how this point relates to the discussion, I'm not suggesting to ship an Italian or Spanish dictionary in Japanese, I'm saying that we have plenty of languages shipping without a default dictionary, including tier 1 languages.

> 4. Intended languages in the most OS (or application) for Japanese edition
> are Japanese and English.

What do you mean with "intended languages"?

> 5. We are using English here. :)

Dictionaries can be installed from AMO, as I did for both English and Italian. That really doesn't mean that they typical user of an Italian build needs an en-US dictionary. 

Again, it sounds more like a discoverability problem than usefulness of having an en-US dictionary. Sadly, there's really no way to tell from telemetry data.

Shipping by default the English dictionary, also means that anything written in Japanese will be marked as an error, because 1) (they can't even
Lost a piece while moving around text.

> Shipping by default the English dictionary, also means that anything written
> in Japanese will be marked as an error, because 1) (they can't even

… switch to a proper Japanese dictionary
I don’t remember much about the original context, but I think it’s okay to drop the English dictionary unless the build system allows to sync it regularly from the source. The dictionaries installed from AMO are subject to auto-update. And not so many Japanese people are using English daily.
Flags: needinfo?(kohei.yoshino)
I filed bug 1466554 to investigate if it's possible to centralize dictionaries. In that scenario, I wouldn't have a problem shipping the en-US dictionary in Japanese.
@marsf
In case, who would own the task of updating the dictionary in tree? If you want to keep shipping it, it should be updated and synced periodically with en-US.
Flags: needinfo?(chimantaea_mirabilis)
I've just updated dic files. The original en-US files are from here:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/c025ac36825e/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/hunspell

https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/ja/rev/659116adb619
https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/ja-JP-mac/rev/7ea4374d48bf
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 6 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(chimantaea_mirabilis)
Resolution: --- → FIXED
See Also: → 1496995
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.