launchpad-translators team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

El Sa 20 de 03 de 2010 a les 13:48 +0000, en/na salsaman va escriure:
> Hello,
> this is my first message to this mailing list. I am the main
> developer/maintainer of the LiVES Project (http://lives.sourceforge.net)
> 
> First of all I would like to thank the launchpad team for providing such
> a great service. Thanks to launchpad, translation is underway in over 25
> languages with new ones being added regularly. Secondly, thanks to all
> of the many translators who have contributed to LiVES translations.
> 

Awesome.

> However, not all is good news. I was recently checking out one of the
> translations (Brazilian Portuguese) and I noted a problem with the user
> interface. Now LiVES is a very complex tool and it has to show a lot of
> information/options on the screen. I have spent a lot of time (many
> hours) making sure that everything fits nicely. The problem I noted was
> with menubar entries. In the translation, these are somewhat longer than
> in the original, which means that the menubar is actually wider than the
> screen, which cause problems in th GUI. I have done what I can to fix
> this, but there is a limit to what I can do.
> 

There is something else you can do as well: you can use translator
comments. These comments get extracted by xgettext when you are building
the POT template and then they are put there. Launchpad supports these
comments and shows them to translators.

For you as a developer, it is as simple as adding a C comment on the
line above the string (either good-old /**/ comments or C99, C++-like //
comments). E.g.

/* TRANSLATORS: try not to use more than approx. 12 characters */
printf(_("Short string"));

You'll see if this works if after creating your POT template the
"TRANSLATORS: ..." string appears in it. Note that the use of all-caps
TRANSLATORS is only a convention, it is not required for the comment to
be extracted.

> The solution is to keep menubar entries as short as possible. For
> example, the English "To_ys" is translated in pt_BR as "Brinquedos
> [_Y]". First of all, it is not that important to keep menu accelerators
> the same, so the translation "_Brinquedos" would suffice.
> 

I've seen this happening in some translations, and the way this can be
solved is to train translators through translation teams and use a
slightly more tightened translations policy if you care for quality.

I've noticed that LiVES is 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 or Structured 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.

Using the code analogy, a Restricted policy is like with a distributed
revision control system 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.

> Secondly, I would like to ask that translators actually test the
> application they are translating. If that had been done in this case,
> surely somebody would have noted the menubar problems and for example,
> shortened "_Brinquedos" to "_Brinq.s" or something similar.
> 
> OK, I am not complaining:- this is just general advice for translators
> of this particular project.

Thanks a lot for the advice, I'm sure translators appreciate it.

>  A question then for the launchpad team - I
> would like to post the above information on the project translation
> page, e.g. as "General advice for translating this project". My
> suggestion is that you allow developers/project maintainers to add
> advice specific to their project.
> 

That's actually a good point, and it has been discussed in the past. As
an alternative, this might fulfill part of the requirement:

You can also add a comment to the template itself in Launchpad:
https://translations.launchpad.net/lives/trunk/+pots/lives/+edit by
editing the description. This description will then be shown in
https://translations.launchpad.net/lives/trunk/+pots/lives

I hope you can find this info useful.

By the way, translators, here's where you can start translating the
project:

  https://translations.launchpad.net/lives/trunk

Happy translating!

Regards,
David.

[1] https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/launchpad-translators
[2] https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/YourProject/ChoosingAGroup

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

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