launchpad-translators team mailing list archive

[salsaman <salsaman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,
thanks for your response to my message.

2010/3/22 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.
>

I'm sorry, could you explain a bit more about translator comments ?
Are you saying that the comment has to start with the word
Translators: ?

I have tried adding comments, e.g.:

http://lives.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lives/trunk/src/main.c

if you look at lines 703 - 707 for example, but these comments do not
appear in Launchpad.





>> 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.
>

OK, thanks for the tip - I will review the policies as you suggest.
Maybe it would be good to leave it open for a while longer and then
ask for reviews of all the translations (is that possible ?).



>> 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.
>

What I have done for now is to make sure the very first message which
comes up is actually addressed to translators. It points them the URL
of a readme:

http://lives.sourceforge.net/TRANS-README.txt

which as you can see has a simple test plan to make sure the GUI works
as intended.

Having said that, I had to fiddle with the code to get this to come up
as the first string. it would still be nice to have a link on the
project page that would show that same information. I can't imagine it
would be that much work for Launchpad to implement it.


> By the way, translators, here's where you can start translating the
> project:
>
>  https://translations.launchpad.net/lives/trunk
>
> Happy translating!
>
> Regards,
> David.
>

Thanks for the plug :-) I had to release a new version yesterday due
to the discovery of a bug in the prior release - so thanks to anyone
who responded before that, and keep up the good work for the next
release !


Regards,
Salsaman.




http://lives.sourceforge.net
https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/salsaman