ubuntu-translations-coordinators team mailing list archive

[Aron Xu <happyaron.xu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Arne,
Thanks for your reply first.

> 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. :)
>
> 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)
>
I know the work will cost much time, and I think I can have a try to
help you on the import queue as well as the generally coordination
work, I would like to choose challenge myself to sort out such tasks,
:)

> 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).
>
Thanks for your understanding.

> 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.
>
Definitely yes, as I have commented before, I would take such challenge.

> 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. :)
>
Well you two might get different angle so have two conclusions. My
opinion is that everyone can do some coordinate work as Adi has said
before, but this team should take the responsibility to ensure as many
as languages can be added correctly and punctually to Ubuntu, to
achieve this, we need to help teams to get translation related things
work in any area we could reach.

> 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).)
>
Sounds good plans, I think I can work on some of them if you would
like me to or accept my application to this team.

> 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.
>
The start of my applying for this team is just I heard David saying
UTC need more community hands in #ubuntu-translators, and after some
consideration, I decided to have a try. I will try my best to invest
to keep balance of my time, like what I've said before, I would like
to take the challenge.

> 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
>
Sure, perhaps David could know more about my cleaning up progress,
there was around 407 members on Simplified Chinese team before, and
I've cleaned the members who are not active for a specific period of
time or whose work's quality was falling far behind the team's average
level, those members was mostly added in the beginning period of this
team. Now the number of members has decreased to 278.
I am busy working with several collaborators who are upstream
translators in mainstream software like me, we are now trying to get
more people work for upstream and there is a significant effect
especially on the GNOME Simplified Chinese team, more than half on
that team was sent from our Ubuntu team.
We had done a research in LoCo community forum and IRC channel, many
people prefer using Launchpad for translations because they could deal
with less technical issues and whenever they have time can take care
more or less strings they are interested in. So we tried to set up a
path to submit translations by upstream translators rather than
persuade even more people just go upstream directly, only ones who are
most active with first-class quality will be contacted to become an
upstream translator if they want.
The main Linux distribution spreaded in China is Ubuntu, I guess there
is more than 60% Linux desktop users are running Ubuntu (the amount
for servers should be very small due to the only usage can be hold by
RHEL/CentOS, but we can ignore them because we cannot use Chinese in
getty), so having a good quality to Ubuntu is an important task.
Promotion of Linux in China is kind of difficult because of some
historical reasons that most people (I mean more than 95%) learn MS
software from the very beginning of their education and didn't even
have a chance to access other OS, some of them have got a mindset on
those software is true software. Also the mainstream of computer users
cannot use English very fluently, so translations should be one of the
most important parts of the promotion.
Other distros like Fedora may use upstream translations directly not
liking us to have a second review on Launchpad, so most of translators
upstream have account on Launchpad and are on the team now. These
people's most work on Launchpad is use it to find out good
suggestions, translations or mistakes and then trace it back to
upstream. As I've mentioned in the former message, we have a loose but
central organization called i18n-zh where most mainstream projects'
Chinese translators are related to that project, I found most of them
are there on the team, these people can keep eyes on packages they
assigned themselves at upstream as well as in Ubuntu.
For Traditional Chinese, things might be quite different from
Simplified one. At first place, two kind of Chinese are not only
different in the characters are traditional or simplified, but has
different usage, different glossary and even quite different grammar.
Simplified Chinese(aka zh_CN) is mostly used in China mainland with a
great amount of people, and Traditional Chinese(mostly indicate zh_TW,
but there are many other derivatives of the traditional one e.g.
zh_HK, that are only little different from it) are used in Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Macao and some part in Singapore. zh_TW and zh_HK often
have the same maintainer upstream but now have different teams on
Ubuntu with different form and different situation. I will contact
these two teams' leaders to find what we could do together and share
our experience. Sooner or later, I will sort out an article about
Chinese to help people in other teams or who want to help in any way
e.g. coordination in Chinese. I think we need to  get better
understanding in situations every language might have, to tell the
truth, the more detailed relations of Simplified and Traditional
Chinese can be kind of complex thing to figure out without direct even
for a native Chinese sometimes. :)

Cheers,
Aron