Tuesday 3 March 2009

Contributing translations

In a comment to my last post, somebody mentioned that the translations would be better on Launchpad than in GNOME. Adi Roiban posted two articles on his blog showing how to contribute to GNOME translations:
Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations and Contribute to GNOME as a translator

I'm pretty sure I'll leave the GNOME translations as a feature in that list :)

8 comments:

Vadim Peretokin said...

I didn't see anything mentioned in that post in regards to millions of strings being shared and auto-suggested when you're translating the same one in a different project / place like Launchpad does.

Why is it better and more enjoyable if open work is being duplicated and not shared?

Vadim Peretokin said...

"Translate the file, save it and the upload the file back on the GNOME translation website. That’s all."

Well, it's easier for me to go to a URL, type in the translations, and press "Save & Continue" - than download a .po, open with a program, type in the translations, press "Save", go to website, and upload.

So I'll cheat and contribute the easy way :) just because some developers don't value my time and create more unnesessary work for translators to do, doesn't mean that translators should actually waste their time not translating.

andre klapper said...

If the string quality wouldn't be that bad, Launchpad would certainly be a nice UI to work with. But currently nearly everybody can enter nearly everything that s/he thinks is better. Launchpad (and also some Fedora translations) have had the less consistent and pretty typo-prone strings I've seen so far.

Vadim, work IS in fact duplicated if a project is listed in both Launchpad and GNOME's damned-lies.
If I was after more contributions I might prefer Launchpad, if I was after quality I'd definitely prefer GNOME.

Vadim Peretokin said...

You do know that Launchpad besides the 'open' mode where anyone can translate also has a 'restrictive' mode, where anyone can only make a translation, and then an approved person/team verifies the suggestion and sets it as the final one?

That solves your quality issue.

andre klapper said...

Yupp. Looks like "approved person/team" had lower expectations on quality than I had. Of course this might have changed in the last months, would be nice.

Still the duplication problem remains.

Vadim Peretokin said...

Well... I'm probably misunderstanding you, because the only duplication problem I see is one being done deliberately by the project decision.

But, your program :)

Kevin Kofler said...

s/the project/Ubuntu/

They're the ones who duplicate translations on Launchpad/Rosetta when upstream already has a perfectly fine translation system and never bother merging their forked translations in one or the other direction.

KDE developers have been complaining a lot about this.

Vadim Peretokin said...

There is a magic 'download translation' button on Launchpad, which emails you personally the .po translations.

'perfectly fine translation system' - sorry, no. I have yet to see something as good as Rosetta (with such a usable and thought-out interface that makes it easy to translate, not waste time figuring out how to, and a suggestion pool of all projects translated - for any given project, 30-50%, 10% unless it has a lot of uncommon strings, can be translated just by re-using an existing translation. I wonder if you ever translated and know what it's like.)