Feature proposal: Community Translation Tool

Christoph Höger choeger at cs.tu-berlin.de
Wed Nov 26 23:38:34 UTC 2008


Hi,

did you ever want to use fedora in your own Non-English language and saw
strings which where simple to translate floating around untranslated?
I did. The best example is packagekit-gui's update dialog which has a
'review' button which was translated into german for f10, but remained
untranslated in f9 although it was really easy to do. 
Why did I not contact upstream/fedora bz with a translation? Well, look
how translation works for such simple strings (and normal users):

1. find out which package that string belongs to
2. download the source (and figure out how to do that)
3. edit that translation file in that weird format with that weird tool
and create a thing called a "patch"
4. send that patch to bz (have a registered account!)

The point is: Joe Average User will not even consider doing that! If he
considers creating a bz account he can read english and will not have a
very big problem understanding some untranslated strings here and
there. 
I would like to make that process automagic by providing
a) a simple app that allows users to make a "one string" contribution
b) write a backend, that would store all proposals and update all .po
files fedora has on a regular basis and send the generated patches
upstream or to a fedora translator.

Those tools could be integrated in a way that users could poll on
translations on a "yeah, that sounds good" basis if there already exists
a translation. Also the client could be offered/configured based on the
locale selected at install time.

Any ideas why that should not work / starting points to implement?

Christoph
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