Who's in charge of translations (was Re: Tomboy is missing from the statistics pages)

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Yesterday at 23:04, Christian Rose wrote:

> ons 2004-10-20 klockan 18.10 skrev Danilo Åegan:
>> Today at 17:57, Laszlo Dvornik wrote:
>> 
>> > Tomboy is in the GNOME CVS, but it's missing from the statistics pages.
>> 
>> Ok, I've added it. We should also note that only modules which want
>> translations handled through GTP should be in our status pages
>> (i.e. this might be important in case of conflicts between several
>> translators working on a same translation).  So, it would be best if
>> module maintainers themselves asked for inclusion, so we know they're
>> delegating translation handling to GTP.
>
> In my personal opinion, module maintainers have already given such
> delegation and silent agreement by having their software hosted in GNOME
> CVS in the first place.

Ok, that's probably the best way, but whenever I see another module
added which already has some translations (like tomboy did), I can
imagine conflicts arising somewhere, someplace.

[snip]
> But in my experience, all maintainers that want to use GNOME CVS do so
> because they explicitly *want* to benefit from other existing and
> experienced hackers perhaps contributing to their application, and this
> naturally includes translators and documentation writers. I've never
> heard of a single maintainer that hoped for or expected otherwise. On
> the contrary; the work of translators are almost always very much
> appreciated by maintainers. 

Indeed, I'm sure that is the case, and I'm not questioning that.  But
a new translation is a simple case (perhaps even more common, what is
the reason we didn't experience any problems with it ever).  What I
wonder is what happens if they have a long-time translator, and 
now somebody else takes over.  As we all know, different translators
and translating teams have different policies.  Thus, we have a
conflict of "maintainance over translation".

I noticed a couple of translations in tomboy already, and that's why
I raised this issue.

[snip]
> I think the past silent general policy, if there has been one, has been
> assuming this positiveness: "if there's a po directory in a module,
> translators are free to provide functional (compiling) translations
> without further asking". I see no reason for this to change, since in my
> experience this has worked out extremely well. If there is some
> maintainer that would want some additional restrictions, he or she can
> inform about it in additional readme files or something like that.

Ok, that sounds good enough.  But I wanted to have it clear, so
there're no surprises.  Of course, it's still up to us translators to
resolve any issues of that kind between ourselves (I had a similar
thing happen with Serbian translation, when one module was included
long time ago; I discussed it with the translator who did the
translation, he had no problems with my keeping it up-to-date and
syncing with our rules, so I didn't just blindly "take over" the
translation, even though above rule would sort of "allow" me to).

What I don't want to happen is that we get many arguments between
translators on gnome-i18n (imagine AbiWord with all its translations
being put into Gnome CVS at some future date; it's a large module,
translators there have already invested a lot of time, and it would be
likely to have some unresolveable conflicts, since many
people/opinions would be involved).

Cheers,
Danilo