Re: Request for resolving situation(kn_IN)

[Gudmund Areskoug <gudmundpublic gmail com>]

Hello Claude,

Claude Paroz wrote:
> Le jeudi 13 mars 2008 à 17:52 +0530, Vikram Vincent a écrit :
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 13/03/2008, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
>>         On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 17:33 +0530, Vikram Vincent wrote:
>>         >
>>         > Just a few weeks ago the stats for Kannada showed 16%
>>         > translated(anybody can verify this) and suddenly it jumped
>>         to 50%. Do
>>         > you know how much work you forced us to duplicate?
>>         
>>         
>>         Then there's a communication problem.  Is there a mailing list
>>         for your
>>         translation team?  If not, ask for one.  It wouldn't have
>>         prevented
>>         duplicate work if you were the coordinator either.
>>
>> Pramod and Shankar are working on localisation as individuals. The
>> swatantra.org team is working as a *team*. We use Entrans at
>> http://translate.swatantra.org as our translation application.
>> There was also some work done by others in the past and most of them
>> are not active. And we have 2 mailing lists.
>> Personally, I am not ready to throw away this method of involving
>> people in the localisation process.
> 
> (As I am about to send my mail, I see that Gudmund has sent a similar
> mail, sending anyway :-)
> 
> If I understand correctly, you would like to enforce the use of your Web
> translation tool for all kn translations. I can imagine the sort of
> problems you may face where on one side some are committing translations
> directly in SVN and on the other side other people are working on the
> same translations through the Web tool.
> The problematic is somewhat similar to the Ubuntu Launchpad vs upstream
> GNOME.
> 
> I cannot see any optimal solution to this problem.

apart from what you suggest below, the optimal thing IMO would be for
these tools to be made *inclusive*.

In the closed-source type professional CAT and translation sector,
unified on-line translation solutions are becoming à la mode at an
alarming pace (SDLX, Idiom, Across etc. etc.), for reasons that fit
exceedingly ill together with the open source spirit, namely e. g. to
unify and exert centralized control over how and what translations go
where and in what way, and to maintain control and ownership over
translations and translation memories.

This is not the object here, so the tools used for open source
translations shouldn't have to be tailored for such purposes either,
regardless of it not being the intended purpose.

Instead, they should rather do better than that, and be inclusive,
catering to the users - the translators and the community - rather than
acting like proprietary content owner tools.

This is surely possible while still coordinating translation in an
efficient manner.

> One solution could be to divide the remaining work, and announce to the
> current coordinator the particular packages on which you want to work.
> You should then only open these packages for translation in your Web
> tool. When you're done, you send the po files to the coordinator (or
> commit if you get the permissions), and then announce another set of
> packages on which you'd like to work on in your team.

Yup. A tool is there to serve us, not the other way around.

BR,
Gudmund