Re: Problems with the French team

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

Le jeudi 20 juillet 2006 �0:37 +0200, Christophe Merlet (RedFox) a
�it :
> The translators who complain, estimates that it is more important to 
> commit their translation in precipitation than to have a second reading 
> of quality. Today, the process of second reading is public and everyone 
> can take part in it and to note the importance of the corrections in it 
> to carry out before commiter.
> http://gnomefr.traduc.org/suivi/

To get things straight, you had been refusing for a long time that
translations proof-reading is done on the french team mailing list,
instead of being done only by you, making you a potential blocker of the
whole translation process (depending on the free time you can devote to
translations). And many translations in CVS already contain really bad
typos (and I'm not fudding since I have proof-read about 20 po files in
their entirety for the 2.14 release), so it's a bit of a fallacious
argument to say to people that what they send must be perfect, while
what is already in CVS is far from being perfect (and I'm not blaming
anyone for that, that's a simple constatation).


> 
> There is no problem.

Standard answer when somebody asks questions about the french
translation process.
There is indeed no problem as long as

* it's ok for the maintainer to block the work of the whole translation
team

* it's ok for the maintainer to be really rude toward the work of new
translators (I've seen people sending their first translation, and
getting answers along the lines of "this is total crap" and things like
that)

* it's ok to send a translation and get no feedback about it for weeks
or months (might be solved by the http://gnomefr.traduc.org/suivi/ ),
and to get flamed/ignored as soon as you ask questions about what
happened to the translation

* it's ok for the maintainer not to answer at all to people asking
if/how all the translations will get in before a gnome release (we had
~20 translations pending a few weeks before gnome 2.14, and not much CVS
activity)

* it's ok to flame people who might suggest that the translation process
is not perfect and could be improved (for example, by blessing some
contributors as "good" proof-readers, and having a few more people doing
cvs commits).

All in all, my feeling is that RedFox is doing a wonderful job when it
comes to producing quality translations, but that we/they (the french
translation team) are lacking in leadership and openness. 
The translation maintainers are often surprisingly unresponsive to mails
about translations/the translation process, and my feeling is that
RedFox has isolated himself from the majority of the French community by
his behaviour (for example, we've both got #gnomefr and #gnome-fr
because people in there were not good enough for RedFox).

I guess I'll be once again called a "fouteur de merde", but I'd really
like to see some more openness in the gnome french translation
community, instead of having redfox discouraging one by one all (new and
old) contributors who want to scale the translation effort, or to
improve it, ... and actively blocking any attempt to change something
with nothing more than "all is well, everything's perfect, don't change
a thing"

Cheers,

Christophe