bzr-l10n team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

(This is in response to an e-mail with a call for qbzr and bzr explorer
translations sent by Martin Pool, I'm re-sending it here as per Martin's
advice)

Hi Martin,

Thanks a lot to the Bazaar team for making these awesome projects
translatable!

I've noticed that both are translated with Open permissions. This is ok
if that is your decision, but perhaps you could consider using another
permission policy that puts the balance more on the quality rather than
on the quantity of translations.

The Launchpad help page summarizes the permission policies very well:

   https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/YourProject/PermissionPolicies

I'd personally recommend using a Restricted policy, assigned to the
Launchpad Translators group [1] [2]

With this type of permission, everyone with a Launchpad account will be
able to submit translations, which will then have to be reviewed by a
group of trusted translators before being included in the program.

This also helps with comunication: most of the translators in that group
are subscribed to the launchpad-translators mailing list, so whenever
you need to make an announcement or a call for translations, you just
need to post it there and translators will know that.

Using the code analogy, a Restricted policy is like with bzr and
branches, where everyone can create their own branches and merge
proposals (translation suggestions), but these merge proposals must be
reviewed by experienced developers before being merged to the codebase.

Having Open permissions for translation is like having an open
repository where everyone can commit. While this is great for having
lots of translations in little time, in my experience the quality of
these translations greatly suffers. This is for example, one of the
areas in which Ubuntu and Launchpad Translations have got most bad press
historically. In this and the previous cycle we started changing that to
make sure we can provide the best translations around while still
lowering the entry barrier for translators.

I could imagine that both qbzr and bzr explorer, being projects with
technical messages, might better benefit from their translations being
reviewed by experienced translators.

Also, you should definitely consider using:

      * Automatic bzr translation imports [3] [4]
      * Automatic bzr translation exports [5] [6]

Which are in my opinion two of the coolest features the Launchpad
Translations team has developed in recent times. The benefit for
translators is that they know that their translations are always
integrated in the code, and for maintainers is that they only have to
worry about updating the template and announcing a call for translations
before a release, all the rest is automated.

If you need any help in setting up the permissions or any questions on
translations, feel free to ping me (or any of the Launchpad Translations
developers) on #launchpad, and I'll be glad to help.

Regards,
David.

[1] https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/launchpad-translators
[2] https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/YourProject/ChoosingAGroup
[3] http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/import-translation-templates-from-your-projects-bazaar-branches
[4] http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/screencast-importing-translation-templates-from-a-bazaar-branch
[5] http://blog.launchpad.net/general/exporting-translations-to-a-bazaar-branch
[6] http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/screencast-exporting-translations-to-a-bazaar-branch

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
david(dot)planella(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com

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