[Translators] methods for updating a translation ?

[Cristian Secară]

În data de Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:54:50 +0200, Yaron Shahrabani a scris:

> [...] I don't know if this can be imported to Transifex
> > (and for some, like me, online translation is out of question –
> > whatever the platform). 
> Of course upload and download are supported.

And a (new) user account is required...

> [...] Since I'm usually having this discussions with highly technical
> people who perceive localization from a technical point of view I'm
> hitting the same walls over and over again, localization have
> different aspects and numerous required skills and we do not want to
> ignore the less technical people or teach everyone git, gettext, etc.
> to contribute, I'm happy that you know how to use these but don't
> force it on other people, especially if you can still work offline.

Well, nothing wrong in what you are saying, only that an explicit technical method has to remain in place, if/when required for one (good) reason or another. The main reason for me (and a few others I know) for offline translation is one very simple, yet fundamental: to be able to check right away my translation on the real product (and make small re-phrase adjustment if required, based on actual UI context and/or program actions). This, of course, involves a lot of extra work and makes the actual translation to extend over a long period of time, however, for this kind of very specific, non-casual strings on programs like VLC, GIMP, Inkscape or Dia (for strings that are deeply nested in tools or settings), this is a way to assure that the translation is correct and useful for the end user (although there is no guarantee in this regard). Something like a quality check *during* the translation work (as opposed to waiting for an official program release and check then). Although this can be done (probably) even with online translation tools, such a road is a *very* slow and awkward process.

Back to the point: I am still listed as the Romanian maintainer for VLC translation, even if I have no longer done actual translation work in the last few years (to date I am mostly active on maintaining GIMP via GNOME - Damned lies, a platform where I am also committer for Romanian and infrequent reviewer). In the past few days I was contacted by someone who likes to contribute to VLC for desktop translation. I encouraged him (and he is on the way to do some work on this, supposedly using Poedit), but on this occasion I observed that the existing official translation suffers from an old low-level issue for Romanian, in that here and there it uses ş character instead of ș (i.e. s with cedilla below instead of s with comma below, and also for the capital letter) and ţ instead of ț (the i.e. the same Unicode nature).

After he will submit to me the updated translation (and after a quick cross-review), I will batch-correct the characters issue and will upload somehow the update file. If I can do this via git, that would be perfect – except in case this may lead to some catastrophic issue.

> [...] This is why even the Inkscape team is considering an online
> localization platform, I'm managing my translation with Transifex
> privately because I have several PCs with different operating systems
> and I need a single source of truth for my work (I wish I could do
> this freely with Weblate but sadly I still don't have my own instance
> :( ).

Weblate, hmm. Matter of fact I am using Weblate for Vivaldi browser translation and because of this it I gradually slowed the work on it. It is a robust system that works, yes, and has an advantage in that I can spot instantly the translated strings for other languages I chose to (like French, Italian or German), something useful when in inspiration deadlock. But is slow and awkward...

Cristi

-- 
Cristian Secară
https://www.secarica.ro