[PATCH] Move translations to transifex.com (was: Translation management)

[Kévin Raymond]

[snip]

> 
> > Few thoughts before applying this patch:
> 
> I'll obviously hold the patch until after 3.0.1 is tagged

Ok
I just thought that I didn't add any target to just pull translations (without
updating the POT), but this is quite obvious (tx pull -af).
 
> > - Transifex does the PO merge itself
> > - Transifex does not handle fuzzy string by choice. Therefore translators
> >   can't work with the "fuzzy" status (information lost while uploading the
> >   PO file to Transifex).
> 
> That's kinda lame, but ok. I guess that translators aren't forced to use
> Transifex, correct? They can simply use poedit and get the fuzzy
> strings and then send patches from that if they choose.

Not really. The PO file is exploded and stored string by string on the Transifex
database. The usual workflow is to think about the most up to date PO file at
Transifex (if the POT is uploaded of course).
If you start to apply translations patches, you will have to push the PO at
Transifex and the fuzzy status will desapear.

Of course, translators could still use their translation tool (poedit, vim…) to
translate offline and then upldoad the PO to Transifex (without using the online
translation tool). They could also download the POT and merge it on the
previous PO file (assuming they still have it locally) to get the fuzzy message.
But I don't see any translators doing that.

On an other side, by translating online, we still have this kind of feature. We
can send suggestions and doing vote. Transifex gives suggestion depending on the
diff between the history and the new string.
Which is sad is that we don't have this information while translating offline.

[snip]

> 
> > - The transifex client should be installed on the host in order to pull
> >   POs and push the POT.
> 
> That affects me an any translator who chooses to use Transifex, right?

It affects you only.
Translators could use the transifex client to pull or push their translations,
if they don't want to use the web interface. They don't have to.

[snip]

> 
> > - Basically, a maintainer would just have to "make update-po-files" in
> >   order to build a new POT, push it to Transifex, and then pull the POs
> >   that got just merged.
> 
> That is not all that different from my current worflow. But that
> description makes me wonder if what I said earlier is correct.
> 
> Does this switch force us to do ALL editing of translations in
> Transifex? What happens if I merge someone's translation (let's say
> German) locally and then push to Transifex?

As told above, you can translate (or merge) offline, and then merge in Transifex
by pushing this file. Always think as the POs at Transifex. The repo would just
be an history (and we don't get any diff event by using Transifex).

By doing that, you'll change the Last Translator string with your name on the
header. And you can't give credentials to other. Transifex will take your name
when you push the file.
But adding his name directly under the "#Translators:" line should work (but
it will appear on the history if you commit the PO).

But doing all translations through Transifex would provide more quality as we
could have teams, they can handle proofreading...

> 
> > I don't know what process you want to use here, but we can probably use
> > only one Transifex resource by translation template file. Should we define
> > a new one for major releases? (Having only one is probably better.)
> 
> I don't know enough about Transifex to be abel to answer this

In an other way, you can provide several POTs. One for each release (like -3.0,
or -master). But from my experience, translators just want to translate the last
one.

> 
> > There could also be other files, I tried to import the README as a simple
> > txt file, but strings are exploded by-line, which is not the best to
> > translate. Do we want to create a release for websites, Release Notes, and
> > README? (I locked the translations of the README file as it was only a
> > test).
> 
> per line translations would be horrible. There must be a way to
> translate text blocks like README files or HTML files.

Sure, I will see how to manage that.

> 
> I'd love to somehow do the website translations through this as well... 

For this we need to see how to export the website content. There should be a
wordpress pluging, but I am not a friend with wordpress and co.

There are several supported format:
http://help.transifex.com/features/formats.html#user-formats

There is also a proofreading feature in Transifex that I forgot.
A maintainer can choose to download only proofread translations.
But we can proofread only through the online translation tool, which could be
slow. I haven't set the project to use it.

-- 
Kévin Raymond
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