Planning a future L10N infrastructure (including Fedora)
Asgeir Frimannsson
asgeirf at redhat.com
Tue Sep 16 23:23:42 UTC 2008
On Tuesday 16 September 2008 23:29:32 Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Asgeir Frimannsson wrote:
> > > > Thoughts and comments, all sorts of comments, are very welcome.
> > >
> > > Please correct me if I'm reading this wrong but I see "transifex is
> > > great or close to it" and "here's how we're going to build our own
> > > solution anyway" ?
> >
> > Yes, "Transifex is great and will continue to serve us".
> >
> > BUT:
> >
> > If you look at the state of the art in L10N outside the typical Linux
> > projects where PO and Gettext rule, you'll notice we are very short on
> > areas like: - Translation Reuse
> > - Terminology Management
> > - Translation Workflow and Project Management
> > - Integration with CMSs.
> > - Richer Translation Tools
> >
> > This is an effort in narrowing that gap, and I can't see that effort work
> > by evolving an existing tool from this 'cultural background'. Yes, we can
> > get some of the way by developing custom solutions for e.g. linking wikis
> > to Transifex for CMS integration, or using e.g. Pootle for web-based
> > translation. But we would still be limited to the core architecture of
> > the intent of the original developers, which is something that would
> > radically slow the project down.
> >
> > That said, I am not talking down Transifex, and the fact that someone in
> > the community has sacrificed a lot and done a great job in getting us
> > this far within Fedora.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong though, instead of forking or adapting or working
> with upstream, you are talking about doing your own thing right?
We have a goal of where we want to see L10N infrastructure go, to enable us in
the future to provide internal (translators paid by Red Hat) and community
translators with tools to increase their productivity as well as better tools
to manage the overall L10N process. If there is an 'upstream' that provides
this, or a platform on to which we could develop this, then yes, we would
consider 'working with upstream' or (in a worst-case-scenario) forking
upstream.
So to answer your question bluntly, YES - after 4 years involvement in
industry and community L10N processes - I believe we can do better. But
holding that thought, remember that this is in many ways 'middleware', and
making use of e.g. the vast amount of knowledge invested in Translate Toolkit
(file format conversions, build tools, QA) makes sense, and I'm not saying
'forget about all that we have invested in tools so far'. In addition, we are
pulling in resources from other communities on this (JBoss, people in the L10N
industry and academia), so we're not talking about or attempting to pull
attention away from Transifex. (If so, we'd at least consider doing it in
Python!). Still, we find it very important to develop this in the open and
accept ideas and contributions from the wider community, including people in
the Fedora infrastructure.
Regarding building on top of Transifex, I think it is much better that these
two projects 'compliment' each other in the near future. Someone with
Dimitris' caliber, character, passion and vision is very rare (only flaw I can
see in him is I think he's a Gnome guy, rather than a KDE guy - but I can see
beyond that ;) ), and I honestly think it would be both wrong and counter-
productive to attempt to 'hijack', fork or radically change core direction and
architecture of a project that seems to finally gain traction way beyond the
Fedora-circle.
cheers,
asgeir
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