ubuntu-translations-coordinators team mailing list archive

[Arne Goetje <arne.goetje@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

OK, replying to both David and Adi here:

Adi Roiban wrote:
> În data de Jo, 10-09-2009 la 22:01 +0200, David Planella a scris:
>> After Aron's description of his skills and contributions, I'd be happy
>> to add him to the team, so he gets a +1 from me.
>>
>> Arne, what's your vote?

see my comments below. I think Aron misunderstood what our team is
doing, but I don't see any reason to not welcome him on the team, if he
is up to the challenge and can invest enough time without neglecting his
own translation team. :)

>> Have you guys got more questions for him?
> 
> I have talked with Aron over IRC and for now my vote is -1.
> 
> Is not that he is not active in the Chinese team, but I can not see his
> Ubuntu translations related actions on the wiki, bug tracker, IRC,
> mailing list, planet, etc. I am happy if someone can prove my wrong.
> 
> I think that right now, the team is only important for handling the
> import queue. All other tasks can also be done without being a member of
> the team. Maybe we should rename the team to something like
> "ubuntu-import-queue-drivers", or something similar.

Let's be a bit more precise what "import queue handling" means:
Tasks here include:
 * approval of new translation templates coming in
 * adjusting the template details of existing templates when imports
don't happen automatically anymore (in most cases this is just the
'source path' which needs to be adjusted)
 * figure out if an incoming template is really a 'new' one or if some
existing template in the database has been renamed or moved to another
source package
 * identify potential obsolete templates in the database and disable them
 * decide whether or not a template should be exported into language-packs
 * decide which incoming templates are not wanted and block them
 * investigate why files in the import queue are stuck there, in case of
path mismatch, fix it in the template.
 * delete obsolete files from the queue

The following tasks don't require UTC membership and can be done by
anyone who has the necessary skills:

 * investigate 'Failed' imports and assign those cases to the respective
translation teams where possible, or if the fix is obvious, fix them by
yourself and re-upload.
 * identify packaging or upstream bugs and report them (i.e. if a
template is missing or translations are not picked up by the application)

> As far as I know, Aron applied for membership in the team, wanting to
> "help more users get better translations, more translators get better
> working environment" and not to help with the import queue. He can
> achieve this without this membership.

I think maybe Aron just misunderstood what the UTC team is doing (and I
don't blame him, since we didn't publish this on the LP team homepage).

Therefor we should define the tasks the team is doing and then ask Aron
if he is still willing to join the team and help us with our tasks,
especially as they are unfortunately quite time consuming.

> I am not quite happy with the existence of an "elite"/coordinators
> translation team, and I would rather stress that everyone can help with
> general tasks related to Ubuntu translations, including coordination.

Well, the "coordination" needs to be coordinated. :) It's not about team
coordination, that's done (or should be done) by the respective team
leads. Coordination in our scope means to keep an eye on how the overall
translation work regarding Ubuntu in Launchpad is going, identify
inactive teams and languages where no team is assigned and help to solve
 those issues by contacting contributers involved and encourage them to
form a proper team and resolve conflicts within teams with inactive team
leads. So, "our" coordination task is one level higher than what other
contributers do. Therefor it does make sense to have a separate team for
that. In the past this has been done by David and me (before David took
the role of the team lead). But I think every team member has the skills
to do that, it just needs to be coordinated, so that everyone knows
who's doing what. :)

There are also other issues the UTC team could handle, but I'm afraid we
are short of manpower in the moment.
(E.g. actively maintain contact with the individual translation teams,
tracking progress and identify areas where they need help, make sure
every team has a formal contact address (either mailing list or email
address via Launchpad), make sure every team is subscribed to the
ubuntu-translators mailing list, assist those teams where there doesn't
exist any locale for their language to create one (I wanted to do that
for a long time already but didn't find the time to actually do it. :(
), identify languages in Launchpad where there isn't any translation
work going on and which have no team assigned and hide them from view,
hunt down translation contacts in upstream projects for each language
and put them on the wiki, so that we have a list where to submit
translation contributions to (we can point translation teams to that
list to make it easier for them to submit translations back to upstream).)

Therefor I'd like to get more community members on the team. If Aron is
willing to take the challenge and to invest a lot of time in this
without neglecting his own team, I'm happy to welcome him
to our team.

On a more personal note, I'd like Aron to focus on getting the
Simplified Chinese translations cleaned up, send contributions back to
upstream projects and engage into active dialog with his Traditional
Chinese counterparts (which are unfortunately quite unorganized in the
moment) to identify areas of collaboration and possible unification of
translation strings where possible. I'm happy to assist on that matter. :)

Cheers
Arne

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