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Re: Requesting some room to install pootle.debian.org



On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 07:09:55PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 August 2005 18:44, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> > Both tools seem very useful, although I think their purpose is quick
> > translation and results are sometimes far from basic quality.
> 
> I agree with this.

Me too. If you want my personal advice, there is no translation interface is
preferable to this good old po mode.

Actually, what I try to setup is not really (not only) a web translation
interface, but really a cooperative translation platform. In the french team
(let's speak about what I know), there is translators, of course, but also
reviewers and coordinators.


Coordination (or project administration, in pootle parlance) is to say who
is in charge of translating what, what's everybody email address, deal with
lost password and so on. That can be a dumb work which would drive every
normal dude to animal. For example, in the Free TP project, there is over
150 sub-projects and about 20 teams. Only the email and assignment tasks
generate over 10 mails a week on the central coordinator mailing list (not
counting the mails on team mailing list which I don't monitor), each of them
asking for a manual action from Karl, the poor guy in charge of this.

In pootle, sub-project's admin (or language's admin) can deal with it
themselves, dispatching the coordination load.


In the french team, we came up with very complex methods to get every bit
reviewed, since our language is hard enough to make sure that no one can
write it right. But I still feel them quite handwork. The translator ask for
review on the ML, and people send diffs back. It works well the first time,
but when only a bunch of msgid were updated, reviewers either have to review
the whole file, or to forget about the file completely.

Likewise, the BTS is not really adapted to report translation bugs.

It looks like very few exists wrt reviewing and bugging in pootle, but
that's high in upstream's todo, and I have some ideas on how to do it.


Another domain where pootle could help is the statistic corner, like
w.d.o/intl/l10n Having all translations in a uniq database would allow me to
redo the dl10n scripts I were speaking about to Clytie yesterday, and
directly display things on a neat web page. That way, it'd be easy to see
what's still to be translated or what needs updating.


> I would welcome a frontend for translations, but I would also like to 
> either be able to restrict who is able to touch certain translations or 
> have a review/approval mechanism before (changes in) translations are 
> committed.

pootle provide an authentification mecanism, don't worry. This is also a
strong requirement for the free tp, which hosts several FSF project
translations, where maintainers require translators to sign a copyright
disclamer before integrating their work. And write control in pootle can
even be different for each msgid!! 


I eagerly wait for  pootle to offer a po upload facility, so that the web
interface becomes optional. I know that upstream is working on this, and
that it'll soon work.

Then, I'll work on a mail interface to do so, to allow complete offline
work. The free tp robot works that way, I hope to be able to steal some code
for that.

So, in short, what I want to use from pootle is the centralized po files
database. I don't care about the web translation thing, personnaly. But I've
had some good feedback from translators who happenned to work with this. The
more possible interface, the better, isn't it?

Bye, Mt.

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