Online translation tool?

[Marek Mahut]

Hello Lauri,

Lauri Nurmi wrote:
> la, 2007-09-29 kello 14:33 +0100, Dimitris Glezos kirjoitti:
>> I don't remember if I brought this up in the past, but some people have
>> suggested to add a tool to our translation infrastructure for doing
>> translations online. Some translators might prefer it, so we could have
>> that too (as long as it integrates with our existing workflow).
>>
>> Benefits: more people working on the same translation, lower barrier to
>> entry, easier to handle big files, tools have workflow embedded (reviews
>> etc).
> 
> Lowering the barrier for entry is not necessary desirable.  In my
> opinion a translator should understand what (s)he is translating,
> otherwise the translation may end up being words after another without a
> meaning.

I don't agree. I would like to translate through the web interface and
I'm a technical person.

> Most Fedora utilities are quite technical.  If a translator's knowledge
> is limited to using a web browser and writing e-mail, then things such
> as "iSCSI initiator", "volume group", or "BSD disk label" in Anaconda
> are likely to be quite remote and abstract to him/her.  I am not saying
> the translator should be an expert on technicalities, but at least they
> should know the concept of partitioning a disk, and have some idea on
> how networks work, and so on.

So, does ability to modify and commit a PO file results in fact that the
person knows the concept of partitioning a disk? I don't think so,
person can only follow translation guide to do so.

Also, my idea of this is that not everyone would be able to directly
commit. In my head, everybody would be able to commit translation into
"testing/rawhide" PO, after what the maintainer of the language would
have to review the translation and approve it if it's correct.

In other words, less technical person would be able to help with
translation and technical maintainer of the language will only have to
review the translation and not translate from nothing.

> Also if the barrier is too low, people with a lot of enthusiasm but not
> that much patience may turn up to translate a few dozen strings, and
> then disappear.  To some it may be a big surprise that translating a
> whole application is real work, which requires time and thinking, and is
> not simply a matter of replacing English words with ones of one's own
> language.

It's why we have team leads for languages, which can take care and
correct issues with translations. From my point of view, few dozen
strings is better that nothing.

> -LN

Just my $0.2 :)


-- 
Marek Mahut                           http://www.fedoraproject.org/
Fedora Project                              http://www.jamendo.com/