Dear Danilo On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Danilo Šegan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Khaled, > > I am sorry you find this missing feature of Launchpad a deal-breaker. > Here's a few explanations on what's the case with fuzzy matching, and > other ways you can work-around it. > > У пет, 26. 03 2010. у 00:00 +0200, Khaled Hosny пише: > >> What I can't really understand how a very simple and basic feature >> like marking old translation as fuzzy when merging new templates >> doesn't yet exist! some thing that gettext tools had years before my birth. > > I am sorry to hear you feel this way. gettext fuzzy matching works very > well for cases like typos. Unfortunately, it also fails for anything > else because it uses an algorithm based on character counting. I've > seen numerous cases were translations in Ubuntu were 'approved' from > incorrect fuzzy suggestions. At the same time, majority of messages in > Ubuntu are "short" where it does more harm than good. And with long > messages, it's even harder to notice wrong translation if it differs in > something like "not".
But many translators (and definitely *all* reviewers, people with permission to accept suggestions) should know what fuzzy means. When dealing with a fuzzy message it is clearly necessary to see what the difference from the previous English message was - which is true for all semi-automatic translation suggestions. It seems that fuzzy support was eliminated because the translation teams are not *trusted* to handle them correctly, which is not a very nice thing. It should be assumed that translation teams know what they are doing. I don't want to sound too antagonistic here (we all want to improve Rosetta!), but I view the lack of support for fuzzy strings as a serious problem, making launchpad translations inherently more wasteful when comparing to 'direct' po-file translations (such as the GNOME damned lies translation site or translationproject.org). (...snip...) > I am really sorry Launchpad causes so much waste of your time. However, > apart from the workaround Gabor mentioned, there is another: download > latest POT/PO file and do your merging locally using gettext tools, and > you'll get exactly the same benefit msgmerge (from gettext) provides you > otherwise. > > You'll have to go through all the fuzzy messages in an offline PO editor > (like KBabel, GTranslator, POEdit...), but once you are done you can > re-upload it (don't forget to strip fuzzy flags off). > > I don't see how this is different than what happens anywhere else (like > GNOME, KDE, or anywhere else at all). It's just that Launchpad otherwise > hides all the complexity so doing this step that is painful everywhere > is as painful with Launchpad, instead of being simple as everything else > is simple in Launchpad. But then again, I *am* biased. Do the downloaded files from Launchpad contain the fuzzies (such that they are still there behind the scenes)? Or is that only true of the upstream versions? I didn't find any fuzzies in the modules I just tested, so I assume no. But I would very much like the answer to be yes. Best regards Ask Hjorth Larsen Danish translation team -- ubuntu-translators mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators
