← Back to team overview

launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

Re: Comments for translations

 

> It also relates to the "translator comment" feature in the gettext file
> format (po files), although I
> think you have a full blown discussion feature in mind, like on bugs etc.


Yes, as of the fact that my native language is not English I failed to see
the small difference between commenting and discussing, and the discussion
feature as implemented for bugs is pretty much what I intended for
translations.


> Communication between translators and central translation standards are
> very
> important to achieve a high quality in translations. Usually the
> translators
> for a specific language within a translation group organize themselves
> around
> a mailing list and possible a wiki. Ubuntu translation teams and their web
> pages can be found here:
>

The Swedish translation team, since that is what would interest me, on
Launchpad and the Swedish Ubuntu translation teams do in fact have mailing
lists. But, you must be a member of the translation team to participate in
the mailing list and since only the two or three people who are allowed to
approve translations are part of the team this mailing list is unusable for
the very vast majority of translators.

There is a short wikipage with guidelines for translations, and there is
also a broken forum. Otherwise there is no form of communication other than
directly emailing or PMing other translators, which never happends.


In this situation what would you recommend me doing? Because it seems as if
the existing infrastructure is not doing the job and the by now five years
old discussion bug does not seem to be implemented somewhere in the near
future if I don't do it myself. Which, considering my absolute lack of
experience with Python and databases, will not happen either in the near
future.

Should I start a new mailing list and invite everybody I see translating to
Swedish to it for discussion?


I do agree that it would be useful for a translator to leave *a* comment
> with
> the translation to explain why this translation was chosen. For the actual
> *discussion* there are other means that already exist, as mentioned above.
>

And about the means, bringing something out of context into a separate
discussion forum or mailing I assume does not work as well, and is not as
inclusive, as having the discussion in context. Including this discussions
in the .po files as comments could work, even tough crowding the source
files which may even be a good thing. I assume that comments are ignored
when compiling, as of such including comments in the source won't impact the
application size.


Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it.

-- 
www.twitter.com/Rovanion

References