Re: Problems with the French team

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Preliminary note: I'm not a translator in the French team, but I've been
trying to help when possible.

Also, the mail will probably have to be forwarded to the mailing list of
French translators since I'm not sure many are subscribed here. (I'll do
it if it isn't already done)

Le jeudi 20 juillet 2006, à 01:49, Christian Rose a écrit :
> Anyone interested in the French translations should read this.
> 
> It has come to our attention that there are some problems within the
> current French team. This has been witnessed on this list
> (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2005-October/msg00146.html)
> as well as testified in complaints by numerous French-speaking
> contributors on IRC and in private mails.
> 
> To summarize, the current official coordinator for the French team,
> Christophe Merlet (RedFox), has been doing a tremendous amount of
> contribution in the past, and owns a lot of credit for that.
> However, for a longer period of time, people have been complaining
> that he has been unable to perform his duties as a coordinator in a
> satisfactory fashion. The complaints range from everything from the
> official coordinator being a bottleneck in the review process and
> translations as a consequence not being committed in time for
> releases, to the coordinator simply not being involved much in the
> translation team's efforts nowadays.

It should be noted that he's not been involved in the past few months
because he was ill. He handed over the leadership of the French
translations to Benoît at this time. However, he did not hand over
official coordinatorship.

> At the same time, Benoît Dejean appears to be functioning as some sort
> of unofficial coordinator for the French team, and has been doing so
> for several months. According to trustworthy sources, Benoît owns a
> lot of the credit for any recent activities in the current French
> team. At the same time, as I understand it, there appears to have been
> disagreements between the current team of contributors and the
> unofficial coordinator on one hand, and the official coordinator on
> the other hand, and the official coordinator has let us know that he
> has no intentions of resigning.

I know many contributors (or past contributors :/) who disagree with the
way the team is coordinated. However, there might be some contributors
who agree (I'm not aware of any of them, though).

> This is a big problem, because from the official GNOME Translation
> Project side of things, we always only officially recognize the
> official coordinator that is registered with the project. But since
> the current French team lead by the unofficial coordinator has now
> been asking for resources (translator accounts) that we only allow the
> official coordinator to grant, and the official coordinator has denied
> those, this is very much a problem on the highest level.
> Normally we would ask the team to resolve such issues by themselves,
> but in this case, that appears to not have given any results, so we
> are forced to do something about it, even if we do not like it and
> would want it not to have happened. Hence this mail.

Indeed. We've been trying to solve the issues for more than a year,
without success.

Here are more details on the issues and recent changes I'm aware of:

 + Christophe was a bottleneck because he was the only proofreader and
   committer

 + nobody was aware of the current status of the translations (who is
   translating what, is the translation being proofread, will it be
   committed soon, etc.)

 + it was proposed to send translations on the mailing list so people
   can review them. After much discussion, it was at last done for some
   time, before we found a best solution (see below).

 + we're now using a webtool to know the current status of translations
   (it downloads data from l10n-status.g.o and let people reserve a
   module for translation, attach the translation, review it, etc.)
   It should help mitigate the "proofreader" bottleneck issue.

 + some translators were sad that they did not appear as last
   translators in the po files (I don't know whether it's true or not,
   but it was said in a mail sometimes ago)

 + Christophe Bliard got appointed as (unofficial) coordinator for the
   doc translations. He's been doing a good work on them, so we're all
   happy to see him coordinate the doc translations :-) He got a CVS
   account and he'll be able to commit the doc translations.
   (don't get confused, we have two Christophe :-))

 + there were a lot of flamewars in the last year: some people wanted to
   have a better organization, but had difficulties trying to convince
   the coordinator it was needed. However, as a result, we wrote the
   webtool.

 + some translators left. My opinion is that they left because their
   translations were not committed soon enough or because of some rude
   mails.

 + in the past few months, new people joined and did an awesome work,
   with new translations, but also trying to improve cooperation with
   other projects to get more consistency in translations. Benoît felt
   that one of these people should ask for a CVS account, to let things
   go in CVS without blocking on only one person. Christophe disagreed.

 + I don't know if anyone is looking at bugzilla for our bugs.

Now, Christophe Merlet, the current coordinator, definitely wants to get
a good French translation. I believe that's the reason he wants to check
as much translations as possible and that's why he is seen as a
bottleneck.

I believe that the French team should be more open and that more
delegation should occur.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.