Subsurface translations move to transifex

Kévin Raymond shaiton at fedoraproject.org
Mon Mar 11 03:13:58 PDT 2013


[snip]
> 
> > also i haven't tried the download/upload feature yet, but apparently
> > the online editor is strict about the count of '(', which could be a
> > PO/getext limitation, of which i'm not aware of.
> 
> I absolutely hate that it counts parentheses. That's flat out stupid.

The online translation tool has been rewritten. I don't think it's
finished yet but a huge work was done. Therefore, I am not sure if what I
am writting still apply. At least for the old original tool (called
"Lotte") that was still alive one month ago, those check errors were just
notification. You could have saved the translation.
Only Gettext errors (checked with "msgfmt --check") were bloking.

> > another problem i'm seeing in the online editor is while it shows
> > where the EOL break is at in the base text, it does not provide the
> > current cursor position, so i have to copy-paste the text into a "real
> > editor" to conform with our 80 chars per line norm, which i kind of
> > like.
> 
> Yes - Kévin and I talked about this earlier - it's kind of an odd tool
> for translating flat text like the README...

When you need to comply with text width, translating offline with your
favorite tool is probably faster.
I am personnaly using online translations only for quick update/fix.

I originally added the README there to check which settings are best to
translate plain text file.
Transifex has plenty of file format and depending the one you set,
translations are more or less easy to do. For README, I set it to
"wikimedia" format (therefore using wiki syntax will help the error
checking I think). This because we did not want to have one string per
line, but instead string breaking by new empty line.

I'll try to look for other format but I think this one work fine. Still
people should try to limit to 74 or 80 characters wide. I don't know how
to let them know.

> 
> > finally, i'm pretty sure that a public translation submission DIFF of
> > sorts, might also on their TODO list and this would be a nice feature.
> 
> Yes. I still haven't figured out how consensus is created, how the
> reviewing thing works, etc.

Few words here.
Only team members can submit translations. It's a per team access which
prevent you pushing on the wrong language.
It's a per team translation. Each team have to select one or more
coordinator who are going to manage their team. They can create their own
mailing list if they want, or just translate without knowing each other..
We can also set the project to be free for all, when you won't be any
translation teams and anyone would be able to override any translations.
IMHO this is wierd, there would be no collaboration, no coordination, no
QA... It's fine to get fast translations, but ... Therefore I didn't
choose this option.
Each team could select the translation workflow they want. Huge team would
probably set translators and reviewers, while small team will just
translate the most they can.

About reviewing, it can be using the new review feature, with the reviewer
power. But IMHO this feature was designed on the wrong way.
Actually this is the maintainer who decide to pull only proofread
translations or not. While small team won't use such a time consuming
feature, they will be penalized.
The idea would be to let the coordinator setting this switch, enabling to
download only reviewed translations or not.
Actually, reviewing is only made online, string by string or page by page.
If you have already translated 2,000 lines, you'll need to mark them as
reviewed page by page under Lotte. Again, the Indifex team has an RFE for
marking has read the whole ressource, but I am not sure it has been
implemented on the new translation tool.

Being a "proofreader" or "reviewer" under the Transifex team is just one
level above simple "translator". He is able to translate and review
strings.

Actually, proofreading is doing on the fly, how folks decide. They can
coordonate this or not.

Last, we can't have diff from Transifex. The original release (bellow 0.7)
was under an SVN and translators received a diff by email for each file
change. That was abandonned for many reasons.
What I have done here[1] to get this is pulling the translations from my
team with a daily cron. I will loose the history if there where two file
edits on a day, but at least we can see some change. And this also
store translations credits on the git if someone wants to build stats.
Here[2] is the script that I use, but it has many specificities for my
need.

[1] https://wip.fedora-fr.org/p/traduction/source/changes/master/
[2] https://gitorious.org/tiny-scripts/transifex/blobs/master/get_all.sh

-- 
Kévin Raymond
(Shaiton)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.hohndel.org/pipermail/subsurface/attachments/20130311/a3a2a835/attachment-0001.pgp>


More information about the subsurface mailing list