Re: What can Git do for translators?

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

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Leonardo F. Fontenelle
<leonardof gnome org> wrote:
> Em Sex, 2009-01-09 às 03:27 +0000, Simos Xenitellis escreveu:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
> I hope the submodule feature works for us.
>
> I don't like the KDE approach (even if KDE translators don't seem to
> bother having scripts changing PO files in the repository), and it works
> best with a policy of giving SVN accounts to most regular translators
> (that would be circa 10 in my team).
>
> The TP-Robot approach might work most of the time, if it can receive
> screenshots as well. Same for an Web-based approach (e.g. Damned Lies).
>
> There are some translations which are not in PO files or in screenshots;
> e.g. the welcome mail in Evolution. If we get a simple "commit"
> interface like TP-Robot or Transifex, then we will need to decide
> between keeping translators with commit access or handling exceptional
> translations (like the welcome mail) via bug reports.

I think the wording here would be that teams would continue to have
commit access (in the same sense that developers commit code), and
that it is desirable to have some additional automated way, either
through the web or by email or even through gtranslator, for those
translators that wish to, to add their translations.

Simos