Re: Mistakes in doc translations

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 23:04 +0200, Bruno Brouard wrote:
> Le lundi 16 avril 2012 à 22:14 +0200, Andre Klapper a écrit :
> > On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 21:01 +0200, Bruno Brouard wrote:
> > > I am sorry, i don't understand what you mean. Is it possible to have an
> > > example?
> > 
> > To put it into other words:
> > Shaun fixed something in Git, and the translators OVERWROTE the fix with
> > his/her next commit to Git.
> > 
> Thank you again, I am not stupid :-)
> 
> But Shaun speak specifically of "markup mistakes" and said
> "I don't know what everybody's workflow is, but probably some
> translators treat
> what's on their machine as canonical, and copy it over without ever
> trying to merge."
> I don't understand this previous sentence.
> 
> Can HE give a concrete example of the error (that maybe i am doing)?
> 
> As the message is intended to all commiters, i think it is better to be
> clearer, even if it
> is necessary to name someone. If i am doing mistake, i want to learn my
> mistake.
> I am just a human.

I have corrected markup errors in the French translations. See my
commits here:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-user-docs/log/gnome-help/fr/fr.po

But the errors are always new errors. As an example of my corrections
being overwritten, look at the Slovenian translations. Here's a commit
I made about two weeks ago:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-user-docs/commit/gnome-help/sl/sl.po?id=34f54c24c2d69d94fdf4124436c84b2d977045e0

And here's the commit I made today:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-user-docs/commit/gnome-help/sl/sl.po?id=4f68f59f5da11f193cc4eaa91c34c4c9f6e045b7

This is the workflow that usually leads to these kinds of problems:

1) Get the file from git and copy it to some folder somewhere.
2) Edit the file.
3) Update your git repository, or clone it fresh.
4) Copy the file from some folder into the repository and commit.

Using this workflow, you will never get merges of other people's work.
If anybody else edits the files you edit, you will always overwrite
whatever they do.

And I realize many translators are used to basically owning their own
po files and not having to worry about other people editing them. But
module maintainers have to be able to fix syntax errors. And until we
get better tool support (like the kinds of checks you all already have
for format strings), we'll continue to see these mistakes.

--
Shaun