Translation owner (was: Slides from the Debconf6 2nd BOF about i18n infrastructure)

[Javier SOLA <lists@khmeros.info>]

Translation ownership and rights is one the things that we will have to 
think most in the specs, as this might change a lot from team to team. 
We have not yet specificed much about this in WordForge

There is one traditional path of localisation that is usually followed 
in proprietary software and content (translate-review-approve), but it 
not at all unique. In this case the committer is the "approver", but in 
some others the translator is the committer, and the reviewers are only 
consulted.

The jobs (in the translation team side) seem to be clear (please add to 
the list if you can think of more): translator, reviewer, Translation 
Manager (approver?), terminology manager.

The rights or permissions can also be defined (committing, uploading, 
approving new terminology, etc...).

What we need to specify are the translation processes that we have to be 
open to, and - in each one of these processes -  which rights are given 
to each participant.

A flexible application would allow a team to chose a process, assign 
rights to each type of participant and to decide which type of 
participant can delegate rights (admit) other types of participants. 
Should only the Translation manager allow new people in?... or can a 
reviewer accept new translators?... or a translator accept new 
reviewers?.  There are a large number of things that need to be left 
open, in order to be very flexible.

The system needs to be flexible... but have a lots of defaults for new 
teams or small teams not to get lost in customizing what they need.

Other parts of the specs are quite straight forward, or technical 
decision, but this is the one that will make the system acceptable to 
existing Debian localisation teams or not.

Javier

cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:

> On Saturday 20 May 2006 15:05, Gintautas Miliauskas wrote:
>  
>
> > Hello,
> >
> >    
> >
> > > The slides we used during the 2nd BOF of Debconf about i18n
> > > infrastructure are available at:
> > >
> > > http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/i18n/debconf6-bof2.pdf
> > >      
> > Great job.  It's already a bit difficult to keep everything in my head,
> > I just want to get started with the backend and see how things work
> > out ;)
> >
> > I am still not sold on the 'translation owner' idea, I think that would
> > be too rigid.  Of course, this can be made configurable.
> >    
>
> the concept of 'translation owner' is central to the way 
> (debian)-translation works:
> - translation is not an exact science and personal elements like style do
>  come in to it
> - having lots of people directly messing with 1 translation is just not a
>  good idea as it produces mixed style translations (kinda how wikipedia
>  articles often aren't al that cohesively written, even though all the info
>  is there)
> - a review comments coupled with sane orphaning/hijacking procedures really
>  give you all the good points of people being able to contribute easily,
>  without the headackes of different people directly messing with the same
>  translation
> - having more then 1 translator isn't all that necessary for most
>  debian-specific translations (a single debconf-po file with more then 100
>  strings is uncommonly big, and the few bigger translations like apt, dpkg
>  and aptitude, don't move all that fast)
>   NOTE:  this might very well be different for big translations of program
>          interfaces especialy when the program development, and amount of 
>          updates needed moves fast
>