Re: Appdata translation

[Federico Bruni <fede inventati org>]

Il giorno ven 9 ott 2020 alle 16:07, Thibault Martin 
<mail thibaultmart in> ha scritto:
> Hello translators,
>
> We do translate applications interfaces and documentation, but we do 
> not translate their appdata.
> Given there are longer-term plans to build-up a flatpak-based kind of 
> app store, should we not translate appdata as well (as in: 
> application description, screenshot captions, maybe even screenshots 
> themselves)?
>
> Do we have everything we need infrastructure-wise to do it? Is this 
> something we intend to do at some point? And if yes, what do we need 
> to move ahead?

Last year we had a discussion on this topic here:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/damned-lies/-/issues/149
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2019-June/msg00015.html

The conclusion was: "Translating release notes as part of the UI 
translations is too much a burden for GNOME translators for a small 
benefit. It may not be the last word on the subject, but that could be 
discussed on the gnome-i18n list first."

I think the burden might be mitigated with some good practices:

1. App authors should write concise release notes.
2. Limit the release extraction to the latest x (2?) releases. How? 
Move the old release notes to the NEWS file and then regenerate the 
appdata file specifying how many release notes should be copied. Both 
appstreamcli and appstream-util have this feature IIRC.
(BTW, Nice blog post by appstreamcli author: 
https://blog.tenstral.net/2020/03/maintain-release-info-easily-in-metainfo-files.html)


GNOME apps have 2 releases per year. Each release may contain say 5 to 
15 strings (?). See for example:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/blob/master/fractal-gtk/res/org.gnome.Fractal.metainfo.xml.in.in

10 to 30 short strings per app per year shouldn't be too cumbersome for 
translators.
What do you think?