[Translators] methods for updating a translation ?

Fri Feb 12 15:09:04 UTC 2021

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 3:54 PM Cristian Secară <liste at secarica.ro> wrote:

> 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...
>
It's not fully open source, if it's any comfort to you it is GDPR compliant.

I don't think that hit-and-run contributions are prolific in the long run,
it requires a lot of maintenance and zero commitment.
When I see these kinds of translation projects I usually neglect them
because fixing someone else's mistakes could be very time consuming in a
big project and I can't really contact the source of it so I can't even
guarantee it won't be reverted in the future.

>
> > [...] 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.
>
Screenshots, comments and string related discussions are a very good way to
go, it just requires some more initial coordination and dedication but it
can range from a very shallow explanation to a link to a video explaining
what it means, it's up to you.

Another issue that I have is scale.
Although using tools locally on your computer is pretty convenient it
doesn't scale so once you have all your scripts and trick in place and you
switch over to another computer you have to do it all over again or write
scripts to establish all the environment for you and it doesn't always work
for all translators because of OS differences, languages, experience,
needs, etc.

Yet, I don't think using offline tools is a bad approach, it's a great
approach that can have an optional online backend connection on demand.
This is why I've opened these two bug requests:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtranslator/-/issues/127
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432198
And I also sent a mail to the Poedit maintainer Vaclav with a request to
support Weblate in addition to the current Crowdin support.
I'm not sure about Virtaal and others but feel free to suggest more if you
will.

Better tools are always on demand, we just have to make sure we support
them the right way.

>
> 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.
>
I can update it for you if it doesn't feel right for you to register.

If there's an active Romanian team on VLC it can be pretty catastrophic
indeed.

>
> > [...] 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...
>

When it comes to open source all I can tell you is: if you feel it's
broken, come and help me fix it, your input matters and by looking at this
list of issues (I don't have any open issues) -
https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/issues?q=is%3Aissue+yaron+is%3Aclosed
You can be sure your suggestions and questions will be taken care of pretty
seriously.
Michal always responded pretty quickly and handled each of my requests with
the right amount of care.
I've committed numerous fixes to Weblate (most of them are typo fixes) and
I keep suggesting and help forming the future of this system because I
think that the open source world is far behind the commercial industry and
we must invest in good tools and make them better, I know there has been
several attempts before (Zanata, Pootle, OS Transifex, etc.) but none of
them advanced so far and offers as many features as Weblate.

Kind regards,
Yaron.

>
> Cristi
>
> --
> Cristian Secară
> https://www.secarica.ro
> _______________________________________________
> Translators mailing list
> Translators at videolan.org
> https://mailman.videolan.org/listinfo/translators
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/translators/attachments/20210212/8113fc82/attachment.html>