On Tuesday 11 April 2006 23:37, Daniel Nylander wrote:
> Basically, my view is that the blame for this problem lies partly with
> Rosetta, and partly with the translation teams themselves. In reverse
> order:
> Now, this process may not work for every team. Some teams have lots of
> people, others not so many. Equally, this process is by no means perfect
> (I'd be very interested to hear what other teams do). It's up to each
> team to figure out what quality assurance system works for them.
> However, a quality assurance system IS necessary, if the problems like
> those experienced in the Dutch team are to be avoided.
>
> What concrete proposals could assist here? I'd suggest that some common
> "translator group guidelines" would do some good. But it's a very big
> job to "reform" existing groups, both in terms of the amount of work,
> and the delicacy of the social problems (it's important to get the
> balance right between encouraging inclusive participation, and quality
> assurance). However, if groups set up well thought out mechanisms for
> quality assurance, I feel convinced that it is a job which can be
> successfully carried out.
It would seem obvious to me that when you're translating gnome-stuff you do
so as part of the gnome translation effort, en hence follow
gnome-translation procedure.
When messing with existing translations you shoud at the very least contact
the last translator about it (who should be the translation maintainer),
and preferrably you're working with him/her to get things changed upstream.
When you don't you're effectively forking the translation.
I gather that Rosetta doesn't really deal with the concept of (upstream)
maintainer of translations. That's probably fine when dealing with
ubuntu-specific translations, but it is a fundamental problematic
limitation when messing with upstream-translations.
Quite frankly I would suggest making it mandatory for ubuntu-translators to
coordinate with upstream translators (outside of Rosetta), or not use
rosetta to mess with upstream translations at all.
There are diffs available between ubuntu packages en debian packages. Is
there any similar thing for ubuntu-changed translations?
If so why hasn't this ever been communicated to upstream (wether debian,
gnome, or whatever) translators? (at least I'm not aware of any such beast,
and I maintain a lot of dutch translations in Debian)
> The fourth is purely social. The main reason that translation groups
> don't do QA is that they are not aware of this need.
I would definately say that this doesn't fly for translation groups in
general. I think most debian-l10n groups that have more then a couple
translators do have a working procedure where reviews are a normal part of
operation (see [1]). AFAIK the same goes for upstream translation groups
(like from KDE or gnome)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/l10nCoordination describes the procedure used by
debian-l10n-dutch and several other teams
--
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
1. Encrypted mail preferred (GPG KeyID: 0x86624ABB)
2. Plain-text mail recommended since I move html and double
format mails to a low priority folder (they're mainly spam)
Attachment:
pgpE7Dw1mzPB8.pgp
Description: PGP signature