(Sorry if this message appears twice, I have tried to send through
Google’s web interface but that didn’t seem to work…)
Hey,
I haven’t used Transifex so I don’t know many details about that, but
Sunbird also has a web-tool that I do have some experience with. By
itself is convenient for casual changes, it provides a nice UI for
quickly being able to contribute a translation. Very low barrier of
entry, and perfect for quickly correcting that incorrect composition
that has been bothering you. The tool has several downsides as well though:
1. It doesn’t provide for a translation community and discussion of
translation-wide topics. There is no way to contact the other
translators. Individual strings can be discussed but I have the
impression that those comments are rarely read. For example, someone
recently changed about half of the strings to use the informal Dutch
form of you, and this change was not discussed nor applied consistently.
I am hesitant to change it back because I don’t want to start a
revert-war, and I would like future contributions to adhere to the same
form as well.
2. Nor is there a review process; any half-wit can change a translation
to be totally incorrect or inconsistent.
3. I personally prefer editing text-files by hand, a real text editor
gives you more flexibility wrt. searching. E.g. I do a lot of regex
searches to compare translations and make sure they’re consistent, and
that is not possible from a web UI, and neither is doing a global
search/replace and then comparing the differences with the current
strings before submitting it.
About actually running Trac, in my recent contributions to the Dutch
localisation I have not build and run Trac myself, however looking at
the source files and the running version of the old translation @
trac.edgewall.org was definitely a great help. You can’t translate
without context. I think it would be good if Transifex would provide
links to the English source files, dunno if it already does that.
As for write permissions to the repository, with the Firefox translation
one member of the Dutch localisation team is responsible for doing this.
The good part of a Dutch committer is that he can do some basic quality
control on what is committed, and of course understand peer review
discussions held in Dutch (which is more convenient than doing this in
English) and hold back on checking in patches until the discussion
finished. This person however does need to have a neutral attitude, that
is trying to achieve and follow consensus, so you can’t just pick anyone
for this job.
Wrt. DVCS, a Mercurial mirror repository would be nice. Managing
changes, especially if you have multiple sets of them that need to be in
separate patches, as is often the case with localisations as you want to
address parts that are still under discussion in separate patches, is
very bothersome without a DVCS.
~Laurens
On 4 dec 2009, 14:52, Christian Boos <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This morning I discovered that the Transifex hosting site [1] had
> integrated Trac as a test project [2]. As it stands, this mainly gives
> us an overview of the work in progress.
>
> I was told that there were some concerns about this, and questions about
> the implications this will have for our translation process. So let's
> discuss this openly here. The statistics themselves are a non-issue, as
> this is merely informative and should have no consequences, other than
> perhaps motivating the translators to update their translations, of
> course ;-)
>
> The real question is if it would be a good idea to allow submissions
> from Transifex, what would be the pros and cons.
>
> Personally, I think this would be a good thing, and my immediate
> reaction was to wonder why the submissions were not yet activated... So
> I got in touch with Dimitris Glezos (Transifex's lead, who created that
> Trac test project ) to know a bit more about the options we have. The
> Transifex FAQ is also quite informative [3], as is their (Trac!) wiki
[4].
>
> So let me start the discussion with the following few points.
>
> Most large projects are delegating direct write permissions in the
> repository to their translators; so far, no one has requested this for
> Trac, but I can see how this could be a good idea, as this would
> streamline the contribution process, and let translator have direct
> control over the translations they contribute. This doesn't mean that
> there couldn't be someone who takes care of the technical quality of the
> contributions, checks that the correct tools are used, etc. In that
> respect, Transifex used as a middle man would alleviate all the
> administrative burden, as only one account would have to be created. The
> technical details, whether we should get those contributions by e-mail
> or use an intermediate dvcs repository are also open. Anyway, having an
> official Trac mirror somewhere (be it a git or mercurial one, or both),
> would be a nice thing in any case. Hosting our own mirror would also be
> option, I imagine.
>
> Transifex also has "Collections" of related projects (currently Django,
> GNOME and LXDE). I can imagine a "Trac" collection in this picture, as a
> way to collect all the translation projects for all the plugins, once
> people realize they can already translate their plugins ;-)
>
> Editing translations directly on Transifex's site is probably not an
> option as of yet, due to the limitations of Lotte regarding the size of
> the catalogs, but as I understand it, this is going to change.
>
> While the ideal for getting high quality translations remain in my
> opinion having people actually running Trac and testing their
> translations to see how well they work "in context", having the
> possibilities to get translations directly from a web interface doesn't
> sound bad either.
>
> As I was writing this mail, I got a reply from Dimitris, telling me he
> handed down maintainership of the Trac project on transifex to me;
Thanks!
> I'll activate or not the submissions depending on the outcome of this
> discussion.
>
> -- Christian
>
> [1] -http://www.transifex.net
> [2] -http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/trac/
> [3] -http://www.transifex.net/faq/
> [4] -http://transifex.org/
--
~~ Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!! ~~
Laurens Holst, developer, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac
Development" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en.
