Re: What can Git do for translators?

["Simos Xenitellis" <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico ximian com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 15:24 +0000, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
>
>> The GNOME dev discussion takes place at
>> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/thread.html#00003
>> The discussion is somewhat heated, so it's no place for translators to
>> post about.
>
> The "real" discussion about how the migration is being done is in
> gnome-infrastructure:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2009-January/thread.html
>
> And our scratchpad is here:
> http://live.gnome.org/GitMigration
>
>> If a move eventually takes place, it will require time and effort, so
>> it would not happen within the next six months.
>
> We hope to have working repositories, at least for guinea pigs, within
> two weeks :)  Moving all the repositories over to git will of course
> require time --- it's not the conversion that is the biggest problem,
> but fixing the infrastructure and writing documentation.
>
>> The big question is, how would a DVCS affect the GNOME localisation workflows?
>
> One of my tasks for the migration to Git is to write a little bunch of
> tutorials for various scenarios --- maintainers, contributors,
> translators, etc.
>
> However, I'm not 100% sure about the workflows that translators tend to
> use.  Do people mostly use web tools (and what happens then --- does the
> tool commit for them)?  Or do they checkout a whole module and simply
> commit to the .po files?  Or do they checkout a *single* .po file and
> then commit it back, or send patches to a language coordinator?

Currently, the web tools do not commit translations for the
translators in GNOME i18n.

Thus, what translators with SVN access do is
1. Checking out a full module and committing the translation (after
running 'intltool-update LL', which updates the translation to the
latest version of the code)
2. Checking out just the po/ subdirectory and committing the translation.

It is not common to send patches of PO files for committing because
the reference files provided from damned-lies may change at any time
when new translation strings are added.

The Translation Project (http://translationproject.org/) has (for many
years now) an automated system where you send the translation file as
an e-mail attachment and it adds it for you to a common location of
translation files.

Something that would be desirable with GNOME translations would be to
able to make easily changes across all the translations of a language,
and then commit the files in an easy way.
In KDE, all translations for a specific language reside in a separate
directory tree, which makes it easy to make overall changes. I think
the KBabel/Lokalize tool has an option to allow to view all the
translations in a single list, so that one can identify discrepancies
in similar terms.
The same tool has an option to commit (SVN) the translations from
within the GUI.

Reading about 'git submodule' at
http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html it looks it might be good to
try this feature in order to separate the translations from the code
in each repository.

Simos