Re: Web-based translation for GNOME

[Dwayne Bailey <dwayne translate org za>]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 14:58 +0100, Danilo Åegan wrote:
> Hi Simos,
> 
> Just to be clear: something like this should *not* be obligatory for
> Gnome translation work (even though you never implied it would be, I'm
> putting a disclaimer here :).

I think that is a given.  Glad you said it though so lets not walk down
that route :)

But on another note one thing that I notice most current l10n
coordinators seem to miss is that:

1) Pootle has the potential to bring much new fresh blood into your
communities, blood that is not all CVS, KBabel, vi inclined.

2) Pootle has the potential to improve the quality of translations
generally, through structured review cycles.

3) Pootle has the potential to make coordinating a language much easier
as you know whose assigned what could set goals, etc

And lots more...

s/Pootle/Translation management tools/

I'm biased :)

> While I think having web-based translation tool would be excellent for
> official GTP, I find Pootle quite lacking in features.

I met a guy last week who refuses to use a cellphone: "I used a car
phone in the 80s they were big and impractical, been there done that, so
I'm not bothered with getting a cellphone"

At Translate.org.za we're actively using it. Yip there are many things
that could be added and they are appearing every day.  I've run it with
40 people translating Firefox into Zulu.  We completed Xhosa in 2 days.

I guess what I'm saying is don't judge a moving target on your
experience from the first releases.

> Today at 14:35, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> 
> > b. The stat pages contain complete information to locate the .po/.pot
> > files, such as branch, folder, location of .po files and so on. That
> > info could be parsed from HTML. Any suggestions to have some other
> > format for these data, that's easier to parse?
> > c. There will be a dependancy to the structure of the HTML pages, unless
> > again there is some sort of XML file, listing the complete information
> > of the translation files.
> 
> Look at gnome-i18n/status/data/translation-status.xml file for your
> input.  At some times, l10n-status gets out of sync (between updates,
> when someone does some changes to translation-status.xml), but that
> shouldn't be too big of a problem. 
> 
> Another approach is to use jhbuild modulesets files (Carlos has been
> planning to use them for still unfinished new status pages).

Thanks will look at that.

> 
> > d. Web-translation tools could commit the changes using either a common
> > CVS account (for example, for Pootle, you can either translate through
> > the main installation at http://pootle.wordforge.org/ or install it on
> > your own), or have team leaders (that want to do Web-based translation)
> > put their username/password in the Web-translation system.

I don't think there should be a global Pootle account although that
could work.

If you install your own Pootle its easy as you can just run against your
checked out PO files and checkin manually

Putting your username and password has all sorts of issues with private
public keys etc.

What can work now - or with a few changes - is to download the .zip file
from Pootle and extract that over your checked out Gnome.

> Or perhaps simply e-mail the coordinator who would be able to commit
> it on their own?  That's a completely valid option, and the one I
> would most likely use if I end up using it at all.

Email sounds good but do you want 100 emails?  We need some better ideas
on what change notification needs to come from Pootle.

How would be best to represent what changed? diffs on PO files are often
hideous and unhelpful.  How would you reject translations?  I'm not sure
if it would work to create a complex email parser.

With the Translate Toolkit we can already merge changes into an existing
PO file.  Maybe one option is to email those changes and the coordinator
can edit those changes and merge them offline?

-- 
Dwayne Bailey
dwayne translate org za
+27-12-460-1095

Tshwane: I managed to leave Pretoria without moving.  I hope we've done more than change the name.