Le mardi 18 mars 2008, à 20:55 -0500, Alberto Passalacqua a écrit :
It's a topic a bit more complex than "do we need it?". From my experience, using a tool like vertimus totally changed the way the french translation team (GNOME one, not openSUSE one) works. It suddenly was easier to understand what was happening, easier to know the status of each translation (under translating, waiting for proofreading, etc.), and also it helped attract new contributors. And the translation really improved a lot because of this.
Well, to be honest, after a period of "not finding translators", I had to reject some requests. Translation is an easy task by definition, so it's not hard to attracto contributors, especially if the project is well know, if it's not too big, and if there's a reward (opensuse boxes seem very effective :P).
I wouldn't say translation is an easy task, it's quite hard (at least for me ;-)) to do high-quality translations. Getting all translations consistent wrt terms being used, for example, is not easy. Glad to see that you're able to attract new contributors, though. If you have to reject some requests, maybe you can redirect them to some upstream projects (GNOME, KDE, translation project, etc.)?
I don't see what's complex in doing something like:
svn checkout url
once, and then
svn update
the rest of the time. Of course integrating it in lokalize and poedit would be nice, but it's an enhancement more than a real need.
Well, I'm glad that you don't need any change. But I'd be surprised to hear that every translators feels comfortable with svn. To make it clear: if I had time to translate, I wouldn't need most of those tools either. It doesn't mean other people don't need it.
About the applications, a simple tutorial on the wiki did the trick in my case (for the Italian team).
Now, if we also make it easier to commit things, or easier to translate with a specific app, this will remove a bottleneck, or lower the barrier of entry. And again, there will be more contributors.
Yes. But I don't agree with the "everyone can commit" policy.
I didn't say everybody would be able to commit :-) But it'd be easier to allow people to commit if needed, and they wouldn't have to understand svn.
Again, the plan would be to have the use of all those tools optional: you're not forced to use them if you don't want to use them. But having them improves the translation process and the translations in the long term.
As I said, I don't believe in the fact that the problem is on the translators side. I would really concentrate the effort in imposing _hard_ string freeze. The lack of respect of a string freeze is what, in my experience, made me lose more time.
I agree that a hard string freeze would help. Note that one of the tool I'm talking about (damned-lies) automatically sends a mail when a freeze is broken to tell about a new string. Very useful.
For the rest, the management of the translation process is basic, and can be summed up this way:
* Count the strings. * Divide by the number of translators roughly. * Assign them the files * Translate * Proofread * Commit
The only tasks done by non-coordinators are "Translate" and "Proofread". For the rest, it's really a question of opening OOo-calc and doing some sum.
That's one way to organize the work, yes. My point is that it might not be the best way for everybody, even though it's fine for you.
What you say might be true when there are a lot of strings and applications to translate like in KDE or GNOME, but for openSUSE it seems really a more costly investment than beneficial.
Well, why would it be costly for you if it doesn't change anything to your workflow? I mean, it would cost me time, but it's fine since I'm willing to do this because I'm convinced it's something we have to do. FWIW, looking at the stats, there are 31607 strings. That's huge. For reference, the official GNOME modules contain around 40000 strings. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org