Re: Improving things for translators

[Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>]

Le vendredi 14 mars 2008 à 16:12 -0500, Shaun McCance a écrit :
> On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 14:26 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > Le jeudi 13 mars 2008, à 13:56 +0100, Kenneth Nielsen a écrit :
> > > > One last item is that more and more teams are now able to translate the
> > > > documentation, but it's very hard since it's not frozen and can change
> > > > at the very last minute. Claude suggested on IRC that we add a new
> > > > documentation freeze for translators: the freeze would start the
> > > > week-end before the .0 release. This way the documentation can still be
> > > > updated during the last week before the release and translators have a
> > > > few days to update the translations. I think it'd make sense to lift the
> > > > freeze after the .0 release (so documentation can still be updated
> > > > between .0 and .1) and enforce it again the week-end before the .1
> > > > release, and so on.
> > > >
> > > > Any comment about this proposal?
> > > >
> > > > Vincent
> > > >
> > > Sound great. Maybe a bit more than one week would be nice. If we make it
> > > two weeks then we split the UI-string freeze period in two. Essentially
> > > giving developers 2 weeks (to update documentation) and translators 2 week
> > > to update them. Would that be acceptable to developers ?
> > > Regards Kenneth Nielsen
> > 
> > It won't work: the documentation is not written by developers, but by
> > the documentation team. And they need more time to update all the
> > documentation in GNOME. If we want to freeze the documentation, it can
> > only be for a very short time at the end of the cycle.
> 
> Indeed.  Documentation writing doesn't really heat up
> until after the feature freeze, which is roughly half
> way through our release cycle.  That leaves the team
> three months to update all the documentation.  Factor
> in these facts:
> 
> 1) Our documentation is out of date, sometimes by as
> much as a few years.  We're still trying to clear the
> backlog, so to speak, which makes for an even heavier
> workload.  If we ever caught up, we'd be in a better
> position to make future updates in a timely manner.
> 
> 2) The desktop release contains 86 documents.  Some
> of them are smallish, but some of them are huge.  We
> add new modules with every release.
> 
> 3) We have almost no active writers at the moment.
> Virtually all updates are those that Ubuntu sends
> upstream.  I'm way too busy being a hacker to be
> a writer.
> 
> My long-standing policy on documentation freezes is
> that it's something we want to do at some point, but
> we're not in a position to do it right now.  We need
> every last second we can get to do documentation.

Hi Shaun,

I'm convinced that a 3 day-freeze in a six months release won't change
anything to the current lack of writers for docs. It's just a timing
matter.

As a translator, what I would absolutely prevent, it's what happened
with the platform-overview document (excellent, by the way!) you updated
some minutes/hours before releasing. We worked many hours on the
translation of this document, Vincent and I, just to see it being only
partially translated in GNOME 2.22 :-(
If a freeze would have been in place, you probably would have planned to
update the doc three days before. Don't take it as a personal attack,
you had the right to do it that way.

> What I would prefer to do, at least initially, is to
> implement voluntary freezes on documentation.

Sorry, but a voluntary freeze means nothing to me. Either a normal
freeze or nothing.

>   With
> Pulse (cue dramatic music) we could extract various
> bits of metadata about status, reviews, and readiness
> for translation from our documents.  Then translators
> could look at Pulse to see which documents are worth
> devoting time to, and which are going to change out
> from underneath them.  Whenever we finish a document
> (cue laughter), we'd mark it as such, and translators
> would know.

Damned-lies already produces stats about new strings to translate. And
we can assume that new strings committed in SVN means they are worth to
be translated also. OK, it may also be work in progress, but in this
special case, a simple mail to gnome-i18n will do the job.

> Having fully translated documentation is of no use if
> what was translated was crap to begin with.  Garbage
> in, garbage out.

Of course, but we can say the same for programs. That doesn't prevent in
any way to put a freeze in place for UI translations.

BTW, the lack of writers seems to be a real problem now, even if we also
see some very good doc practices at time (e.g. gcalctool). But that'd be
the subject of another thread.

Cheers,

Claude