Improving translators experience with l10n.gnome.org

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

(moved to gnome-i18n because I think it makes more sense and changed its
subject to something more meaningful).

Comments below:

El dv 14 de 08 de 2009 a les 18:41 +0800, en/na Aron Xu va escriure:
> Yes, having a web UI might be a good choice for getting more people
> invovled, but it's not easy to control the quality as launchpad has
> set an example for us. Now there is much more people on launchpad but
> not our l10n team working on Simplified Chinese, that's the truth, but
> the quality is just in the opposite of the number of participates.
> Sometimes, upstream translators can be very busy in day life(for work,
> study and etc.), but there are not many people doing the review work,
> others translate on launchpad or someone else on damned-lies, then it
> will be leaving there for a long time till some of the reviewers or
> committers have some time to review them. The number of the files need
> to review sometimes will accumulate to a big number.
> Anyway, the web UI might be only a good tool for newbies rather than
> elder translators. For instance,  zh_CN team's coordinator, he seems
> to hate it someway. We can write scripts or use all kinds of ways we
> think good to help us to accelerate our work while working with po
> files, but for those starter who might still not very clear about
> basic programming knowledge, using po files might be not so
> convenient.
> I think this localization guide explained many things clearly and gave
> good advices, but we might need more effectual way to let the
> suggestions come true easily for every team.
> http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/LocalisationGuide
> For example building up a glossary for the translations to respect. It
> can be a big task for anyone who start to make it out. Any team don't
> have a good glossary will face such a problem: while translating, we
> don't know where to look up, after google but around halt time cannot
> get a good resolution, then we may decide to ask in mailing list, or
> create a new translation of it. This creation leads to the most
> differences on translations of the same word. So I have a suggestion
> that we can start a project contains a glossary list maintained by
> specified persons, and translation teams (coordinators or someone else
> on the team) can take responsibility for them.
> Another thing to concern is making a database of translated strings
> for every team, just like what suggested on the localization guide but
> more easy-to-use, maintained online and accessible for every team
> member. I know some teams might have there website and run programs to
> do such work, just like automatic translate, it can give suggestions
> on glossaries and more, but not every team have the person who can
> write such program or even they don't have a website for themselves.
> We can build a program that every team can use directly if possible,
> may be integrated with Damned-Lies or other better way.

Actually combining damned-lies on-line presence and statistics with
translate-toolkit [1] which is able to create glossaries from a bunch of
given po files it would be really cool.

For example with poterminology [2] we could create a terminology on the
fly for all translations that have strings translated on l10n.gnome.org
and with pocompendium [3] we could create a translation memory to be
used as a local database to query for strings.

And I also see a tmserver [4] which could be used for gtranslator,
gedit, poedit and the likes (even lokalize) to query the translations
on-line.

Even further we could also use pocount[5] to let translators know not
only strings, but also how many words (professional translators get
payed per word instead of per string for example).

</brain dump> :)

Any more thoughts?

Cheers,


[1] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki
[2] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/poterminology
[3] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/pocompendium
[4] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/tmserver
[5] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/pocount


> Just have changed my email from the previous @163.com one to current.
> 
> Aron
> 
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Gil Forcada<gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> > El dv 14 de 08 de 2009 a les 16:18 +0800, en/na Ray Wang va escriure:
> >> 2009/8/14 Aron Xu <aronmalache 163 com>:
> >> > Hi,
> >> > I am doing translations on Simplified Chinese, it's true that we cannot avoid duplication of effort sometime. What's more important, many translators prefer doing such work on platforms such us launchpad.net rather than just facing the original po files, because they think using a web interface can be more convenient and don't need to care about merging pot, check file format, etc. But the problem is also there as everyone knows, it's difficult for translators to control the quality because it's not easy to keep only specified persons working on specified files in the same time up to now. So we cannot using the files from it directly. Upstream translators have to review everything if he/she wants to make them into our upstream translation. Since translating GNOME is a huge project, that's not very easy to avoid all of the shortcomings: duplication of effort, difficulty on quality assurance, wider participation on upstream work. We have to lose some of them when we make
  a
>  ny decision on means of working.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Having a Web translation tool is Great! It ease the process, and you
> >> don't have to be worried about much other than the quality,
> >> limit the people who have rights to modify the msgstr might be a workaround?
> >
> > Sure, reducing the number of people who has rights help, but to have
> > good translations, not only is necessary to ensure a quality, but also
> > consistency across them and within a single translation. What if more
> > than one translator use different translations for "File"? You will end
> > up with file open dialogs with different translations on the title, on
> > the menus, etc ..
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
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-- 
gil forcada

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