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Idea #13571: Translation workflow and collaboration with upstream

Written by OgMacielq the 22 Sep 08 at 23:44. Category: Usability. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
Every day (literally) hundreds of translation suggestions and/or modifications are generated in Rosetta. Due to some current limitations in Rosetta, it is fairly hard for translation teams members to keep up with the flood of information or even know about contributions awaiting for review/approval. My intent is to describe a mechanism by which translation teams can better administrate the contributions sent by Rosetta users, provide useful feedback and take a first step toward a better relationship with upstream projects.

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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #13571
Written by OgMacielq the 22 Sep 08 at 23:44.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #13571 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!

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Attachments
spec Blueprint translation-workflow-and-notification-system: [Information on this blueprint will be retrieved soon]


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Comments
mariod wrote on the 22 Sep 08 at 23:45
Been discussing this with Og, and he has really good grasp of what translators need since he's been involved in translations for over a century or so. What, you dare to say I'm wrong?!

Laudeci wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 01:48
Sometimes we need to do an extra work in roseta to merge some upstream translations, maybe a better method of administration would make translation's lives more easy.

andregondim wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 03:33
We really need this!!!

Madsrh wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 07:35
Great idea!!!
Better relationship with upstream projects is always needed

rubicon wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 08:41
"Feedback" part in the blueprint is really important. Translators should be able to explain some of their decisions, namely uncommon translations and abbreviations.

While such global approving mechanism would improve quality, it would also slow down translation progress. I think the proposed process of committing changes should be simplified a bit.

ubuntuser wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 11:53
Great!

Aracnus wrote on the 23 Sep 08 at 13:39
As a translator of some free softwares, I would love this. Congratulations for this idea!

gjmveloso wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 00:34
Certainly one of the most greatest ideas!

hendi wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 07:41
Have a look at my idea "Use upstream translations" which has 200+ votes: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/125/

Ubuntu's translations are worse than in *any* other distro.

joskulj wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 10:53
I really appreciate your attempt to improve the translation process. Although your idea looks quite smart at the first sight your idea is much too complicated.

It's too complicated to get implemented in Rosetta and I also think it's too complicated to handle, because if you lock something you must always consider the scenario that a translator doesn't unlock the translation correctly. This would require additional admin use cases. All this together would be more complex than everything that's implemented today in Rosetta.

IMHO Rosetta suffers from the lack of much simpler features. Thinks I would like to see in Rosetta are:

(1) an automatic import of upstream translations from GNOME, KDE etc. on a regular basis (daily or weekly)

(2) a web service API to download and upload po files so translation teams can implement own synchronization scripts

(3) an option for translation teams to lock translations from being edited in Rosetta

(4) a subscribing mechanism for translations that sends me a mail each time a new contributor joins in to make suggestions. So I can contact her or him to inform her or him about our team structure, processes an priorities.


OgMacielq wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 13:07
Hi hendi, I will definitely look at your idea as it may already contain what I want OR it could provide me with some more ideas/use cases. :)

OgMacielq wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 13:19
Hi joskulj, thanks for your comment. The issue about locks and what not can be simplified when you add more use cases (as you had mentioned). The scenario I envision for this would be that the official members of a translation team are the ones who can unlock a translation that is taking too long (maybe the user is away?). In order to provide good quality translations, I am willing to give up "speed" for quality translations.This type of process, locking and unlocking plus marking things for review has worked extremely well for the Brazilian team, albeit we're using a different tool called Vertimus.

dnoway wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 13:28
Very good idea!

joskulj wrote on the 24 Sep 08 at 14:57
Let me just clarify that I am totally with you: translations need reviews - there is no question about this. Your workflow addresses this very well and IMHO your workflow describes quite exactly the process we practise in our team without tool support but by having todo lists in the wiki and communicating via mailing list. Therefore I would love to see this workflow supported by Rosetta; I am just a little pessimistic if this will be implemented in Rosetta since much simpler requirements aren't implemented yet.

Furthermmore I think that we may need more than a single workflow. The workflow you set up is a good solution for Ubuntu-specific packages and documentation but besides this we need a way to keep the translations in sync with the upstream translations which should be provided automatically.

leogregianin wrote on the 23 Nov 08 at 03:54
+1

ti286 wrote on the 3 Jan 10 at 05:41
You have to implement a mechanism that recognizes when a suggested translation has been suggested more than once[URL="http://www.onthegophotobooth.com"].[/URL]


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