On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 4:03 AM, Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec@suse.cz> wrote:
You don't need my magic, if you want to start with translation of actual version. My magic is useful for merging upstream translation from the latest version to the old version we have in released products.
My tool does not yet support pushing strings back to upstream, however it's planned feature.
Even if will, translation in two places creates a lot of additional work-flow problems: translators did the work in parallel. Person performing the merge
- Needs remerge
- Does not provent duplicated work
- Need handling of each conflict in translation that can happen, if two
cannot give answer, not knowing all languages.
- Is it only simple difference and both translations are correct?
- Is it a typo fix on Novell side?
- Is it a typo fix on upstream side?
- Is it a typo introduced by Novell? * Is it a typo introduced by upstream?
- Is it a conflict in translator's opinion? There is no algorithm to decide, which of the conflicting translations is correct.
Not providing translation back is a bad approach of Ubuntu, which duplicates the translation effort.
I am not a person organizing translations. I am only a package maintainer, who did some voluntary translation in past.
But from my aspect of view, it would be simplest to translate directly in upstream.
Upstream strictly requires conforming to national translation conventions and a responsive contact person. If translators don't want to (can't) use SVN directly (and ask for commit permission to GNOME SVN), then they may use SVN submit contact person in Novell, who knows SVN and who will submit translations back. Keeping contact person e-mail is mandatory.
I can imagine even a very simple automatic tool, which will extract translation from the Novell database, verify the translation by gettext tools and merge it back to upstream as soon as possible, and another tool, which will extract upstream translation and put to Novell database. Simple authorized web page for translators: Fetch upstream translation Check and commit to upstream
Merging bad translations back to upstream without providing any contact person for the fix is even worse than forking them: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2007-September/msg00254.html
I completly agree. If we want to collaborate translating it, the right way would be do it upstream. -- Kind Regards