Delete Vietnamese localization

[1ec5]

The Vietnamese (vi) localization of JOSM is completely unusable, to the point of insulting any Vietnamese speaker (even a non-native speaker like myself). It hinders Vietnamese speakers from contributing to OSM and hurts their perception of the project. Among its many problems:

• Most translated strings seem as if they had been translated by machine-translating every other word and concatenating the results, disregarding Vietnamese grammar.
• Basic terms are mistranslated in a manner that suggests total unfamiliarity with OpenStreetMap or the Vietnamese language.
• Spaces are frequently missing between words. Words are inconsistently capitalized with no discernible pattern.
• Most strings containing HTML formatting have broken syntax.
• JOSM incorrectly considers Vietnamese to lack a plural grammatical form.

I’m only able to contribute to OSM using JOSM because I’m familiar with the English localization. Every time a warning or error appears, I have to play a game of ​Mad Libs to figure out if my edits would cause problems.

Just a few examples of mistranslated terminology, really the tip of the iceberg:

English	JOSM Vietnamese	Literal meaning	Correct Vietnamese
way	​cách	manner	lối
​reverse way	cách ​xếp	sorting method	đảo ngược lối
to join (a way)	​tham gia	to participate in (a project)	gắn vào
(imagery) offset	​bù đắp	to compensate	độ lệch
lat/lon	​lạt ​lon	bamboo strip of beverage can	vĩ độ/kinh độ
upload to (server)	tải lên để	upload in order to	tải lên
rubber-band	cao su-band	rubber + band	dây chun
delete mode	xóa mode	delete + mode	chế độ xóa
jump there	jump có	jump + there is	nhảy tới đấy
right (side)	quyền	permission	phải
to snap (to a way)	​chụp	to snap a photo	dính

JOSM’s Launchpad instance unfairly blames me for the problem. It says ​my account was responsible for contributing 7,867 strings (61%) out of 12,805 total on 12 May 2015, two days before the localization was committed to the repository in r8352. However, I have no recollection of contributing thousands of strings to a Vietnamese translation of JOSM at that time, when I was too busy to even contribute very much to OSM. Even if I did, I would not have translated a single one of these strings the way Launchpad says I did. That much is clear when comparing JOSM with iD and Vespucci, which I am responsible for translating into Vietnamese. (Launchpad lists a handful of strings of mine from 27 June 2010 that do look like something I would’ve written, but they were all overwritten by the 2015 mistranslations.)

So, as the supposed author of the majority of JOSM’s Vietnamese localization, I kindly ask that it be deleted from the repository until translators have had an opportunity to clean things up. If possible, the offending translations should also be deleted from Launchpad to facilitate the cleanup effort.

[1ec5]

Upload dialog