lp-l10n-fr-community team mailing list archive

[Kip Warner <kip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2013-07-02 at 15:08 +0200, Nicolas Delvaux wrote:
> Hi Kip, sorry for the late answer,

Hey Nicolas. No problem and likewise.

> Launchpad can display these just fine.
> For example:
> https://translations.launchpad.net/pybik/trunk/+pots/pybik/fr/+translate
> (notice the "Located in" string at the bottom of each field)

Kind of. They still need to find the file and line number manually since
they are not URLs. For one string, this isn't a big deal, but where
there are hundreds, it can be a real pain. Moreover, that's not actual
machine readable metadata, but just a verbatim copy of a comment string
created by xgettext.

> So yes, this is one of the things you could provide to help 
> translators.
> Though this is not THE solution because not all translators know their 
> way around source code.

Agreed.

> So, what's the difference with the 2nd string, "Studio Software"?

I actually only see one string for "Studio Software". Maybe you could
show me what you mean?

> I would really like to know how they managed to correctly translate 
> this kind of string without context/asking.
> Maybe I'm missing something.

I don't know either. All I know is there are complete Ukrainian,
Russian, Italian, and almost Chinese and Filipino translations and no
one else has asked before. Maybe French grammar makes it more difficult.

> This is indeed a lot of work, but I think it should be on you TODO list 
> so that the situation can gradually improves over time.

I'd like to, but sadly I'm one man and I have to triage my time to solve
the most immediate issues with the project. That might be something to
look into one day.

> You could, for example, provide a PPA so that translators could then 
> install the latest snapshot with the latest translations from launchpad 
> (and it could be updated automatically daily, as some other projects 
> do).
> This way translators could easily test their translations without 
> having to know how to build the project.
> Don't forget that most translators are not developers.

The problem here is that getting a suitable runtime environment for the
software is not as straightforward as what comes typically in a
prepackaged deb. This software runs off of optical media and needs about
14 GB of mission data to drive it in the way you'd need to do what you
are asking for.

> There are indeed such translators, but not many :-)
> As you probably understood now, my point is that you should do whatever 
> you can to lower the technical knowledge needed to contribute good 
> translations to Avaneya.

I understand where you are coming from and there is not much that we
disagree on. The only thing you need to realize is that I'm quite under
staffed right now and have a long check list of dozens of things to
solve before I can make the first public release. If it had been within
my means to make translations easier, I would have done that.
Translations are very important, French in particular for my fellow
French speaking citizens here in Canada or abroad.

-- 
Kip Warner -- Software Engineer
OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred
http://www.thevertigo.com

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