Re: Coordination of translations via debian-l10n-* lists
On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 02:38:23AM +0100, Tim Dijkstra wrote:
> Well here goes: As I said translator and reviewers use special subjects
> of their posts to the l10n-lists, they have the following form:
> [state] type://name
> Where <type> is for example, po-debconf or wml (webpages). <name> is the
> subject of translation. And <state> can be one of the following:
Let me explain our (russian team) way of handling the load. It it slightly
diffent, and somehow I think іt's more effective. Let me just quote a
personal e-mail to Denis Barbier:
================
BTW, I find you practise at the moment a little bit unpractical. What we
do now at our list is to create some kind of "gate". That means, that
every to-be-translated file (only d-i at the moment) gets renamed and put
into our own CVS on alioth. Every commit to this CVS goes to the list as a
kind of RFC. The translation gets peer-reviewed (not extensively at the
moment, but we have just reached 100%, but it will come) and every person
with a CVS write access can correct the translation. Every now and then,
the translation gets synchronised with the main d-i CVS. This way, one
single person is not "bound" to a certain file (which could be just too
big in relation to the others) and can also commit only a portion of
translation or maybe a simple dictionary synchronisation.
===============
Right now, we are still a rather small team, which only translates
debian-installer at the moment. But we have big plans :) Currently, we are
trying to think of a system, which would track the changes in
.pot-templates and automagically merge them with our files and commit them
immediately to the interim CVS. This way, a translator can be assured, he
edits the latest version available.
Also, as you can, we have re-phrased the Linux developing model, "Release
early, release often" to the "small bits as soon as possible" sense. I hope we
can reach fairly good quality with this method.
Our current concern is how to proceed further. Our plans are to build up
this system of "interim CVS gate", but I'd really like to have a
global Debian i18n solution, from which every translation team would
benefit.
Let me say a couple of words to your system: it's good, but I miss the
dynamics. For example, the debian-installer translations have been last
updated with a RFR about a month ago. I haven't checked the archives of
the list, but I guess this means, that these translations are "stuck" onto
the one person translating them (cobaco). How can someone else continue
the translation and stay synced to the others? Do you have any centralized
location for the latest files? That didn't become clear. IMHO, it is easy
to get lost in the whole scheme, if you are really new to all this. For
example, if a file has been marked as ITT let's say a week ago, I (as a
newbie) wouldn't know, if I could touch it or not. I would not know, how
far the other translator has got. This problem is eliminated with our
solution - take any file you want, most changes are commited within
several hours, so there should not be a conflict with an existing work.
So far, so good :) This was just a presentation of our method, comments
are encouraged. It would be great, if we could develop a solution - KDE
and Gnome teams are far ahead of us :(
> I can imagine that this would also be useful to other language teams.
> So maybe we should optimize it a bit and in the end give it a place
> under http://www.debian.org/intl/
This should definitely happen :)
And thank you for your explanation!
--
Nikolai Prokoschenko
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org
Reply to: