On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 07:12 -0500, Adam Monsen wrote:
> Yes, that's fine. We've been experimenting quite a bit with the data
> anyway so far, so the stuff you see in Pootle for Rhino may be
> replaced before we start in with the "real" translations.

We gave an internal demo of the online translation tool on 17-SEP-2008.
Went well! The only concern centered around the fact that when
default/master translations are changed (by changing the "English"
translations in Pootle) the action of syncing these defaults into what
translators see and translate for French, Spanish, etc. causes all
existing translations for those strings to be wiped out.

For example, here's a default string for a welcome message:

  Welcome to Mifos!

Here's the French translation:

  Bienvenue à Mifos!

Now, say in Pootle you changed the default string to be "Welcome, this
is Mifos!". A developer then runs a script to update default
translations and check them into version control. These updates are
subsequently pulled into Pootle. Then, the person who originally
translated the string "Welcome to Mifos!" into French may have to
revisit their work.

If the only change was to make the exclamation mark into a period,
updating the French translation might not require a native French
speaker, so perhaps the translation should be saved but marked as "needs
review". We'll call this a "non-destructive" edit.

Currently the system only supports "destructive" updates to default
translations, meaning, "Bienvenue à Mifos!" would be blown away and
forgotten if "Welcome to Mifos!" changes in any way. A small amount of
work would be required to add functionality to scripts we have
maintained to allow for "non-destructive" updates to default
translations.

PMs are currently thumbing through the default translations to get a
sense for how many need updating.

Moving forward, we'd also like to adopt the concept of a "translation
freeze". Before the translation freeze, it would be common practice to
change/add/remove default translations frequently. At some
point--possibly coinciding with a product release--the translations
would "freeze", and updates to default translations would not change
strings that translators are translating. During a freeze it may still
be possible to update defaults, but only in non-destructive ways.

It is also possible to not update default translations at all! Meaning,
the "en" files in Pootle can be used directly by deployed Mifos
applications instead of using the default translation. The only problem
arises when meaning of the default translation changed via a Pootle
edit, and French/Spanish/etc. translations don't reflect the new
meaning.

We're still ironing out the process, but we should be able to officially
rollout our online translation tool soon!

http://mifos.org/developers/wiki/OnlineTranslationHOWTO
http://mifos.org/developers/wiki/PMOnlineTranslationHOWTO
http://mifos.org/developers/wiki/AdminOnlineTranslationHOWTO

-- 
Adam Monsen

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