Making it easier on translators

[Hector Garcia <hector scouts-es org>]

Hi all

I have seen some things that I considers to be a problem.  These are
related to the translators (I am a translator myself) of the gnome
modules, wich I consider that they do a very important job to make GNOME
as widely spread as possible.
We should remember that translators don't have to know any programing
language to do a good job.

Problems:

* You have to learn to use CVS (yes it is very simple, but not to
everyone)

* You have to learn how to use branches in CVS (not so easy to
everybody)

* You need space in your HD for having a copy of the whole module to be
able to update your copy of .po to translate.

* You need to do a lot of "cvs update" just to know if one line changed
and need to be translated.


Possible solution:

* Create an automated system to generate the .po files for every
language, that send a letter to translator when a certain number of
fuzzy or undone translation are found in the file (you should be able to
conf this)

* The system should be able to mange branches and make it transparent to
translators.

* Have a web UI to get your .po file, to give it back once translated,
to allow you to configure some things (like sending you letters when a
new version of the .po file is available and there is so many changes)

* To let developers set a translation to be most wanted because a
release is due soon.


I believe that with this solution we drop down the entry point for
people to help in gnome and we will have more translators and more
language in more modules.

If you thing as I do that this that I said is a real problem and that
what I proposed may be a good solution, I will start working on such a
system that I want to do using: Perl, PhP3 (or 4) and Postgresql. I
already have some people willing to help me with this so I think it
would not take too long to have it ready.

So, what you people think?

Héctor García Álvarez