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Re: Not happy at all

 

Hello, Hannie.

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:44 AM, lafeber-dumoleyn2
<lafeber-dumoleyn2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If authors who write new versions only add new strings, and do not add minor
> changes to strings that already exist, our problem is solved. LP will
> transfer all the old strings and their translations, as long as they have
> not changed. There is no problem with new strings, as I mentioned before.
> As for Lucid-e2, I have no intention of reviewing it in LP as long as this
> problem occurs. But it is a pity for all those people who have spent time
> and effort on translating strings that had already been translated and will
> not be reviewed.
> I hope that the Natty version will be based on Lucid-e1 plus ONLY NEW
> strings.
> LP is not to blame in this. It is quite logical that they only transfer
> translations of identical strings.

The Maverick edition is based on Lucid-e2, and Natty will likely be
based on Maverick.  We continue to edit from the most recent version.

A number of the Lucid-e2 strings changed because I moved the margin
notes around.  I actually moved them in Lucid-e1, but it was done just
prior to publishing and after the writing freeze. I didn't push those
changes to Launchpad because it would've caused the same problems
you're seeing now.

As far as I recall, there at no substantial changes between Lucid-e1
and Lucid-e2 -- just fixing some typos, grammatical errors, and
formatting issues.

We can't simply add new text and leave the existing text as is or we
wouldn't have the opportunity to fix these bugs.

Ideally, our translation system would handle these fuzzy matches by
highlighting the differences between the two strings so that the
translator can easily determine whether the new string warrants a new
translation.  It'd be nice if the system could also manage continuous
updates.  So instead of waiting for a writing freeze and having an
entire book dumped in your lap, you could start translating
immediately.  Anything that had been previously translated would stay
in the system and not be lost when the original strings are updated.
Any altered strings would be show to the translator (as mentioned
earlier) for review.

Currently, our translation software works at the paragraph level.
That is, each string is a full paragraph.  The benefit of this (aside
from it being easier for the LaTeX-to-pot-file converter) is that it
allows the translators to rearrange sentences within the paragraph or
rewrite the entire paragraph as they see fit.  This means that the
translated edition will sound more natural and flow better.  The
downside is that if anything in that paragraph changes, Launchpad
tosses out the original translation and you have to start over again.

We've tossed around the idea of ditching Launchpad and creating our
own translation system, but I haven't had time to research the issue
or think about it much yet.  We'd need to sit down with translators,
editors, and developers to establish what our needs are and what a
translation system is actually capable of doing.  If you have any
suggestions or ideas with regard to this sort of thing (or would like
to kick off a discussion about it), I'd love to hear them!

--Kevin



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