[Banshee-List] Translations for the Community Extensions, an experiment

[Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com>]

Hi,

As you might have noticed, the current situation regarding the
translation of the community extensions is not very good : 4
languages, with only one above 60% coverage. Compare this with Banshee
itself : 31 languages with more than 80% coverage.
After a translator filed a bug about the .po file not being updated
[1], it became clear that the translation workflow was far from ideal,
especially compared with what GNOME translators are used to.
1 : https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635855

After giving it some thought, I decided to just go ahead and try to
use Transifex (http://www.transifex.net/) for a while.

What does it change for translators ?
Anyone willing to help translate the Community extensions can go to
the project page on Transifex.net [2] and start translating directly
from the web site. You can also download the .po and work offline.
2 : http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/banshee-community-extensions/

And for developers ?
A little bit of house-keeping is necessary, and that has to be done by
developers :
The template file for translation,
po/banshee-community-extensions.pot, is now tracked by git. It is
updated automatically when you run "make", you just have to commit it
when you're done changing strings. The new version will be picked up
automatically by Transifex.

Before doing a release, we have to make sure it will include the
latest translations. Thankfully, there's a nice command line tool to
do that called transifex-client [3]. I've added the configuration file
to the git repo, so it's just a matter of running "tx pull -a" to
fetch the latest .po files.
3 : http://help.transifex.net/user-guide/client/client-0.3.html

So let's try to use Transifex until the next release, and see how it
goes. If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to the previous
situation, or try to find something else. But I'm pretty confident it
will be beneficial : in the few hours since I created the
banshee-community-extensions on Transifex.net, somebody already
started a new translation to Spanish, and is already up to 61%
coverage !

I'll be happy to hear your feedback, and will try to answer any questions !

-- 
Bertrand Lorentz