re: difficulties with Gnome Translation

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

lör 2002-04-27 klockan 22.28 skrev Mohammed Elzubeir:
> The Gnome system seems to place the developers' individual applications'
> independence very high. That is very well, and it needs not be
> compromised. However, it is also under the assumption that translations
> would be as spread out as the applications' po/'s. In other words, it
> seems that translators are expected to be individually motivated by X,Y
> persons who want to translate application Y. As opposed to Team 1
> wanting to translate the entire Gnome environment and all the major
> applications that come with it.

I don't see any conflict in this. For those who want to translate "all
of Gnome" and may not be much interested in the individual applications
by their own but rather of the environment as a whole, the status pages
is the resource to use. They define what should be translated if Gnome
is to be translated(*).

(*) Currently this isn't the case because for example the unstable
status pages don't just list the core GNOME 2.0 modules but also a lot
of non-core and non-gnome modules, but that's just a bug. I think we
need a seperate stable/extra and unstable/extra report. I'd really
appreciate Carlos' opinions on this.


> In Arabic's case, as noted by Isam in an earlier post, we maintain our
> own CVS.. since the Arabeyes project deals with more than just
> translation. We have our team of translators who work directly with our
> CVS so we can locally centralize the process, and focus on what our
> coordinators decide.

Ok. I think that each translation policy has its benefits and drwabacks,
and the policy of doing and maintaining work locally instead of upstream
of course also applies to this. This is the same problem that every
distributor has when branching software and adding patches and
maintaining local copies. Sometimes it's just the price that has to be
paid that merging with upstream becomes more difficult.


> The problem begins with locating all the applications. Every application
> has its own po/ directory. Which application, and where is it? Do we
> have to search the entire cvs?

Which application -> look at the name in the html status report, or
parse gnome-i18n/status/translation-status.xml.

The name of the po dir -> parse
gnome-i18n/status/translation-status.xml. In almost all cases this
should be "po".

Which branch -> look at the branch information in the html status report
(at the bottom), or parse gnome-i18n/status/translation-status.xml.


> What about applications that have version numbers in the module name?
> How do we work with that, as it changes?

You mean like "anjuta2"? This use of version numbers in module names is
NOT recommended in gnome cvs, and the reason it is the way it is for
some modules is most likely just because some developers didn't pay
enough attention in the past. For some modules it is somewhat warranted
because it's actually independant versions of the software maintained by
different people and total rewrites, but no new modules with such module
names should be added.
For now, just consider them as seperate pieces of software. When those
modules are removed or pronounced dead for some other reason at some
point in the future, you will be likely to hear about it on
gnome-i18n@gnome.org, and translation-status.xml and the status pages
will be updated accordingly too.


> When one considers that, this current setup allows better freedom to the
> translators to decide on what needs special attention (xscreensaver
> example cited).. that is the job of the translation team coordinator.
> One can easily ask the team to ignore certain parts and concentrate on
> others via the team's mailing-list(s), and translation status page (note
> http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=gnome-i18n). 

Yes, that's why the granularity is needed.


> As far as dealing w/ Gnome, I think centralized documentation on what is
> involved (from a-z) would be very nice. There are _many_ tools that are
> lying around which could be used to remedy this, but most of us either
> don't know about them, or how to use them. 

That's certainly a general problem. The reason there isn't any
documentation or bad documentation about the tools is that noone has
time to improve it or has offered to improve it. So any help to make
this better is welcome! For example, kenneth has asked many times for
help with providing docs for intltool, and there are also many other
areas where docs are needed to get translators started. If you have the
possibility to help, please don't hesitate to do so! :)


> In other words, think in terms of automating the transition, from our
> CVS to the Gnome CVS.. if you were to script this entire process, what
> would you need to do? All the steps.. from locating the pot's to
> downloading them, to committing it to our cvs, to modifying it, to
> sending it back... etc. Once we know all that, we can work
> around it, script it.. and offer it for other teams who may find it
> useful. I know that most translation teams may not of have gone all the
> way as Arabeyes has, in terms of cvs, mailing-lists, etc. But, it
> certainly makes the process easier, and much faster.

As I see it, the size of the Arabic translation team is exceptional (I
would suspect most other translation teams to be less than 10 persons,
perhaps most of them even less than five persons, where the numbers of
those who are actively and regularily contributing being even less), and
I think it's also not common that they in addition to Gnome also handle
the translation of most other free software projects. :)

That being said, I think it would be great if we could ease the process
for those (that?) translation team that uses its own cvs like the
Arabeyes team, if we can avoid having to change the process for all
other translation teams. But I have no idea on how to do that, or if
it's at all possible.


Christian