Alberto Passalacqua kirjutas:
At the point where we are with translation management, we should really consider a tool to facilitate the work.
At the moment:
* we use SVN manually * we have a separate web page for statistics * we don't receive communications about changes in .po files * already translated files are altered during operations * we use mixed .po formats (not suse specific, but still a problem) * team management is completely left to personal communication
Simplifying the procedure is now a lot more important than before: now many languages have open translations, so translators are volunteers and not paid.
As a consequence, providing them proper and easy tools is essential not to waste their time as it happens often now (repeated translations of the exact same stuff), and to keep them motivated.
Dedication has nothing to do with solving issues not related to the work someone accepted (read .po formats, merging issues, sudden and continuous changes in .po...we discussed of these already). You may be dedicated, but if you see you're loosing too much time to do technical stuff not directly related to your real goal (translation in this case), your motivation goes down for sure.
To conclude, each improvement is welcome in my opinion in the translation process, which is now quite manual. The fact that a tool is free or open counts a lot less, if it is a good tool.
I'm not against online tools, but there are some hard requirements to fulfill. The first is that these tools should work parallel with existing system, because in opposite case we can loose many of professional or experienced translators who will never use such toys (and win a lot of wannabe translators knowing nothing about existing terminology and even spelling and grammar). Second point comes from previous, such tools should have strict commit and reviewing rights system. The thing that software is open or not, counts much. How the heck we could have some influence to not open tool development? Launchpad may be popular, but for us its a dead end. At this point of time, an open tool, Pootle (and its offline editor Pootling) is under heavy development and is tested by OpenOffice.org community for using as parallel interface for translation teams. When we had some clear points what we want to see as result, our community could help translate-tools team e.g. with svn-integration etc. ain --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org