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Message #00028
Re: multilingual help wanted to translated bzr explorer
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing your expertise and valuable hints.
I have some questions, see below.
David Planella пишет:
(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.
OK, I understand the value of switching to Restricted policy.
But I have one question though. Is it will be still possible for me to
upload POT templates via web-interface? Or I as maintainer of the
project, will be eliminated from translation process at all?
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]
Why you say "should"?
I've watched the screencast you're mentioned here and I may say that I'm
not very impressed. There are some tiny details (and devil is always in
the details) which makes me a little unhappy with automatic imports/exports.
1) The template which is generated by GNU xgettext utility and template
and I've got by exporting from launchpad has some differences. Therefore
each time I have to deal with big enough diff between those 2 versions.
Even if I do a simple round-trip, e.g. collect strings with xgettext,
upload to LP, wait for processing it in the Import Queue, then simply
download it from LP I'm always get something different. I don't like
this behavior. So last year or so I'm even don't try to commit the POT
generated by xgettext, but instead I'm just simply uploading it to LP,
and only commit the files which I've got on export from LP.
2) There is some restrictions on naming of POT and used directories. I
don't like the idea to put the messages.pot to the root of the
development tree, as I can see on the screencasts. Today we have a
reasonable files structure, e.g. all translations located in the po/
directory and domain name of translation is the same as the name of
project (e.g. qbzr.pot for QBzr and explorer.pot for Bazaar-Explorer). I
don't like the idea I should switch to faceless message.pot today. Also
we have a very automated system to collect messages from all source
files, and compile translations to MO format. All these done as
distutils commands, so I can use either:
python setup.py build_pot
(to generate POT with xgettext and optionally update PO files with msgmerge)
python setup.py build_mo
(to compile all PO files to corresponding MO files of the right domain)
I'm also have this command:
python setup.py import_po
which is used to automatically get the files from the
launchpad-export.tar.gz with translations exported from LP and put those
files where they should be.
I think automatic import/export of POT/PO might be good idea for big
projects, but both QBzr and Bazaar Explorer is small enough so we can
handle with these 3 commands above.
Also I'm not really sure is there is required 2 separate branches: one
to use as import source, and other to use as export target.
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.
Maybe you're right, so may be you can help us to setup automatic
import/export for our existing branches so we can see it in action?
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.
I will be very grateful to get some comments on the items I've
highlighted in this mail. IRC is good, but for the sake of sharing
wisdom between QBzr and Bazaar Explorer developers, I'd prefer using
e-mail at this stage.
Thanks,
Alexander
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
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