Re: About using transifex for contributing

Leandro I totally agree with you.

Best regards,

Florin Catalin RUSSEN
Romanian Translation Team



----- Original Message ----
From: Leandro Regueiro <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]; Olav Dahlum <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, 24 May, 2010 16:09:42
Subject: Re: [i18n] About using transifex for contributing

>> Yes, scripting is good for geeks and power users, not commonly mortals Linux users like many of us, that want to contrinute to translations.
>
> Even you need insight to be able to translate.
>
>> A web interface is an excellent extention of the actually SVN one.
>
> Maybe, if he can prevent it from being what Launchpad have become; a
> haven for useless translations.

Transifex was born exactly for that, allowing the sending of the
translations directly to the upstream project.

>>  From my point of view, a web interface will be good for contributors, that found errors and propose alternatives.
>
> Err, the bugzilla already covers the reporting bit. And if you can't
> write a bug report, you can neither translate.

Why you have to write a bug report for a bad translation when you can
actually fix it right there?

>>  Or, in an urgent matter, you can use the web interface from the office, during the day, and after works, at home, from your Linux machine you can use the svn interface.
>
> Again, a good example on how to NOT do it, is Launchpad. Subversion and
> other version control tools are of course available on more than more
> platform...
>
>> A web interface is excellent for people that aren't at their Mandriva Linux personal computer and want to submit translations. They'll be validated by validators (coordinators) and commitred afterwards.
>
> And why do I need to be on the Mandriva ones to do it? Can't I do this
> from wherever I have a local copy of SVN? I'd rather have few and
> skilled translators, than several bad ones I have to babysit.
>
>> Personally I can only congratulate Mandriva and its translators community for tihis initiative.
>
> No, I don't want Mandriva Linux to be as badly translated as other
> distro's due to easy access for everyone.

Maybe this is problem of translators, due to bad use of the tools, or
bad tools, or lack of competence or lack of work on the translator's
side. In our team we think that bad translators could be converted in
good translators if they learn two things and avoid using web tools to
translate. Disallowing the translation from Transifex interface and
allowing only the sending of the translations could face some of the
problems. But think that we need more translators, and putting things
hard for them doesn't help a lot.

IMHO I think that Transifex makes easier to deal with certain projects
that have a messy source scheme and/or need some tricky scripts to
work with it. For that I think that is very likely it will never
exists a transifex for openSUSE since they put all the translations in
one single directory in their source code manager, but in Xfce they
have to put one Transifex for dealing with the increasing complexity
due to a very messy directory structure.