[Gaim-i18n] Re: Rosetta translation system

[Bjoern V. <bj...@cs...>]

Luke Schierer <lsc...@us...> wrote:

> After noticing that Ubuntu has several of gaim's translations
> patched, extending them, Jordi Mallach proposed that gaim may want to
> use rosetta, ubuntu's translation tool, as a means for managing po
> files in gaim.

I think Rosetta is an interesting translation system and I think Gaim
could benefit from it very much. I see Rosetta a bit like a Wiki system
for translations.

As I already said on other discussions Gaim's i18 system has some
specials (see http://gaim.sourceforge.net/i18n):

(1) we have a big amount of translations=20
(2) we have some very active translators (~100% translation ratio)
(3) we have many unmaintained translations (low translation ratio)
(4) we have some maintained translations with a low translation ratio
(5) Gaim's source and such Gaim's i18n strings change relatively often
(6) some i18n strings are difficult to translate (because of technical
     terms, idioms, jokes, missing comments etc. - look at the discussion
     "[Gaim-i18n] Bad language in Gaim")
(7) translators have no write access to Gaim's i18n files in SF's
     subversion repository

I think Rosetta can help the Gaim project to deal with this
specials. I think Rosetta can improve the specials 1, 3-7.

In the discussion I see, that some active translators (2) don't see
benefits for their translation work. I understand this a bit as an
active translator. The translators had a lot of work with their
translations. In Rosetta they lose a bit control for their translation
and they have to learn a new tool.

I also see reviewing as a problem. But to be honest, reviewing of
translations isn't comfortable - in technical sense - with normal
gettext tools too. The translators which work in a team of 2-3 people
know from what I am talking. The main problem is that "diff" doesn't
work good with .po file changes. Each msgmerge/intltool-update call can
change the line numbers in .po file comments. This makes finding real
changes difficult. Also parallel work on translations is not supported
with normal gettext tools. With Jochen Kemnade I build a difficult
system with an additional subversion translation repository and some
update shell scripts for the German translation. Reviewing is difficult
anyway (currently we do this with stripping comments - something like
"grep -v '#' de.po" - and diffing - "diff -u de-without-comments.po
de-other-translator-without-comments.po").

> This would mean a change in how you all access the po files, and could
> well mean help in translating them, I'm unclear of the details here.

But as Jordi said direct work with po files is also available in
Rosetta.

I think we should start with unmaintained translations in Rosetta. Also
the translators which voted with "yes" should have the change to work
with Rosetta.

How we can get better acceptance from the translators which votes with
"no"? Isn't it possible to have 1-man/woman closed teams in Rosetta? So
the chances for these translators are minimal.

Greetings,
Bj=F6rn