Help improving translation

[Thierry Sayegh De Bellis]

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Thomas Canniot wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> First, I apologise to fedora-trans-list to mail this message again. 
> 
> I have been translating fedora in French for few months only and i'm
> facing problems with contributors' translations.
> 
> I used to translate po files, and, as we were very few French
> translators (2 *only*), it was quite easy to ask for the mate to read
> over the translation and to know what he is actually doing.
> 
> However, now that I have less free time and now that we are more than 2
> translating Fedora into French, when I take the initiative to translate
> 2 or 3 missing or recently added strings, I met bad translation and
> mistakes.
> 

this is a classic L18N issue

> There are few problems in our translation process :
> 
> - People are not communicating by mailing list. The fact is that
> translation is often seen as a lonely activity and that you don't need
> any response from someone to take a po file and translate it. There is
> no way to know who is working on what.
> - The status page [1] are useful to know what has been translated, but
> useless to know what has been read over.
> - People do not use the reservation system "take" button and if they do,
> they don't update they reservation.
> 

You need to handle the process as a formal project, with translation,
revision/proofreading and Q&A

> 
> What I'm planning to do : take every po file, and read over them until
> FC7 comes out. This is the only way I found to avoid bad translation in
> Fedora.
> 
> Any advice to help out ?

UI stings can be messy but you need to establish a kind of 'master glossary'

> 
> As we are changing lots of things on Fedora, wouldn't be the time to
> improve the translation process :
> - we shouldn't give anymore rights to upload CVS translation. CVS should
> only be accessible in read only and only people that read translation
> over should be allowed to update po to the CVS.
> - as there is mailing list for modifications on CVS docs, we need a
> mailing list as well for each language po modification. Mailing list are
> easy to set up and do not consume any ressources.
> - we could also use a system allowing to add a status of what has to be
> done with a po file : "waiting for translation", "waiting for being read
> over", "translation in progress" for example, are status that could be
> used.
> 
> just my 2 cents.
> 
> [1] http://i18n.redhat.com/cgi-bin/i18n-status
Allow me to jump in as I am a sysadmin who used to lead a translation
department in another life...

a localization workflow is pretty easy to set up provided you have some
quick checks or milestones. I am willing to help on this as I am
familiar with SCM on the one hand and CAT tools on the other.
I appreciate that there is some kind of process already into place but
it's never too late.

I have not followed the translation lifecycle of Fedora as I use it in
English (I am based in the UK) but being a French native with formal
L18N experience give me a shout and we can probably formalise a way forward


Thierry

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(o<    Thierry Sayegh de Bellis, RHCE
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