Re: GNOME Advisory Board Member Interviews

[Aron Xu <aronxu gnome org>]

Yes, having a web UI might be a good choice for getting more people
invovled, but it's not easy to control the quality as launchpad has
set an example for us. Now there is much more people on launchpad but
not our l10n team working on Simplified Chinese, that's the truth, but
the quality is just in the opposite of the number of participates.
Sometimes, upstream translators can be very busy in day life(for work,
study and etc.), but there are not many people doing the review work,
others translate on launchpad or someone else on damned-lies, then it
will be leaving there for a long time till some of the reviewers or
committers have some time to review them. The number of the files need
to review sometimes will accumulate to a big number.
Anyway, the web UI might be only a good tool for newbies rather than
elder translators. For instance,  zh_CN team's coordinator, he seems
to hate it someway. We can write scripts or use all kinds of ways we
think good to help us to accelerate our work while working with po
files, but for those starter who might still not very clear about
basic programming knowledge, using po files might be not so
convenient.
I think this localization guide explained many things clearly and gave
good advices, but we might need more effectual way to let the
suggestions come true easily for every team.
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/LocalisationGuide
For example building up a glossary for the translations to respect. It
can be a big task for anyone who start to make it out. Any team don't
have a good glossary will face such a problem: while translating, we
don't know where to look up, after google but around halt time cannot
get a good resolution, then we may decide to ask in mailing list, or
create a new translation of it. This creation leads to the most
differences on translations of the same word. So I have a suggestion
that we can start a project contains a glossary list maintained by
specified persons, and translation teams (coordinators or someone else
on the team) can take responsibility for them.
Another thing to concern is making a database of translated strings
for every team, just like what suggested on the localization guide but
more easy-to-use, maintained online and accessible for every team
member. I know some teams might have there website and run programs to
do such work, just like automatic translate, it can give suggestions
on glossaries and more, but not every team have the person who can
write such program or even they don't have a website for themselves.
We can build a program that every team can use directly if possible,
may be integrated with Damned-Lies or other better way.

Just have changed my email from the previous @163.com one to current.

Aron

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Gil Forcada<gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> El dv 14 de 08 de 2009 a les 16:18 +0800, en/na Ray Wang va escriure:
>> 2009/8/14 Aron Xu <aronmalache 163 com>:
>> > Hi,
>> > I am doing translations on Simplified Chinese, it's true that we cannot avoid duplication of effort sometime. What's more important, many translators prefer doing such work on platforms such us launchpad.net rather than just facing the original po files, because they think using a web interface can be more convenient and don't need to care about merging pot, check file format, etc. But the problem is also there as everyone knows, it's difficult for translators to control the quality because it's not easy to keep only specified persons working on specified files in the same time up to now. So we cannot using the files from it directly. Upstream translators have to review everything if he/she wants to make them into our upstream translation. Since translating GNOME is a huge project, that's not very easy to avoid all of the shortcomings: duplication of effort, difficulty on quality assurance, wider participation on upstream work. We have to lose some of them when we make any decision on means of working.
>> >
>>
>> Having a Web translation tool is Great! It ease the process, and you
>> don't have to be worried about much other than the quality,
>> limit the people who have rights to modify the msgstr might be a workaround?
>
> Sure, reducing the number of people who has rights help, but to have
> good translations, not only is necessary to ensure a quality, but also
> consistency across them and within a single translation. What if more
> than one translator use different translations for "File"? You will end
> up with file open dialogs with different translations on the title, on
> the menus, etc ..
>
> Cheers,
>