[Qt-l10n] [Development] Using Transifex for handling Qt localization?

[Diego Schulz]

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Gábor Garami <hrgyster at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just my two cent:
>
> First, I am a translation leader of Hungarian language, and as I experience,
> Linguist is quite enough for translating Qt. Even if Linguist can be better,
> translating Qt is not a very special thing (except Designer and Creator),
> there are some general strings and there is a lot of examples how to
> translate them.
>
> In other hand, I do not know any translation service (including Transifex)
> what can tell you how the string placed what you translating. Linguist can
> show you the complete dialog where the translation will being placed and
> this help is not replaceable.
>
> My second thought is if Qt has a translation software and it is not found
> enough to translate the Qt itself, then we do something very wrong. If
> things are really needed to translate Qt, then we need to implement them in
> Linguist, because this is our dedicated and customizable translation tool.
>
> Btw, I cannot imagine why Nokia (and previously Trolltech) do not foucus to
> Linguist to improve it and make it as a best translation software (I used it
> in a lot of translation project, in some cases I converted external sources
> to TS just for use Linguist, so I little lack an objectivity). As I see
> Linguist is a quite good translator software but it can be more better
> (External API integration in suggestions, more intelligent translation
> memory), and I would like if we improve it instead of giving up a lot of
> work what invented into this utility.
>
> This is my private opinion, maybe I missed some points.

Hi,

I'm just a hobbyist programmer willing to help with the Spanish translation
of Qt and Qt Creator. Some years ago I translated Qt Creator, when it was
in its infancy. It was a fun experience wich forced me to learn a few
interesting things. Since then I love Git and Linguist.

There's nothing wrong with Linguist, really. You know it can handle translating
humongous projects. Certainly it can very well be used to translate
Qt, if you're going to
do it alone. So this sentence you wrote is a fallacy and an exaggeration:

> "...if Qt has a translation software and it is not found
> enough to translate the Qt itself, then we do something very wrong."

Linguist just can't handle the "distributed" part of the work, which
is fine. It shouldn't,
it's not part of the problem domain of translating strings. I'm not
saying Linguist couldn't
be improved in some ways, I'm saying Linguist is not to blame here.

Qt and Qt Creator are a very large projects. Due to the amount of work
it implies, they
can't be realistically translated by a lone ranger using Linguist.
Once there's at least
two people working on this task, some kind of coordination is needed in order to
optimize the workflow. Pushing changes and pulling back others changes
from a Git
repository is certainly possible, but there are a few difficulties with this.

First, the translator must know how to use Git, not just Linguist.
Don't underestimate this.
Then, as more people is involved in a translation team, more
coordination is needed.
Asking peers for opinions on the wording of a simple sentence requires
a bunch of emails
and a lot of precious time and effort. And lastly, the less people
involved in a team,
the poorer the translation is (this is a mathematical axiom).

With Transifex a lot of the impedance just vanishes and more people
can contribute
in a team. Feedback is instantaneous.

As an example, I've followed closely the translation of Reddit.com. As
soon as they
announced the availability of the message files in a Git repository, I
went to clone
and translated some of it. Mine was probably one of the first merge requests and
there were many stalled in a few days. They were unable to handle all
the work and
after some time they gave up and moved to Transifex instead, which was
a success.

My two cents.

Regards,

diego

>
> Regards,
> --
> Gabor Garami
> hrgyster at gmail.com
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen
> <oswald.buddenhagen at nokia.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 03:55:41PM -0700, ext Quim Gil wrote:
>> > - How valuable is to have an efficient tool for handling translations
>> > between teams - as opposed to whatever process we have now? Are we happy
>> > with the current system? Do we believe we would improve significantly
>> > with a tool like Transifex?
>> >
>> not being a translator myself (except to help out with strings i have
>> some relation to as the developer), i cannot really assess the added
>> value. i can imagine it would be significant - qt linguist just ain't
>> that great, and our review infrastructure completely sucks for
>> translations.
>> i cc'd the qt-l10n list to move the discussion over to a relevant place.
>>
>> > fwiw I just learned that Transifex allows projects to define a CLA which
>> > needs to be signed before joining a team.
>> >
>> > As an example (you need to sign in):
>> >   https://meego.transifex.net/projects/p/meego/cla/
>> >
>> > As far as Reviewing is concerned, there is this feature in Transifex
>> > itself. Each string can be reviewed from a privileged translator. Each
>> > team can have any number of reviewers.
>> >
>> you still need to get this sorted with nokia legal, but it sounds like
>> the tools to make a point are there.
>>
>> but irrespective of that, i think it would indeed make sense to make the
>> translations lgpl-only (or use a CC license, as that's more appropriate,
>> at least in theory) - there doesn't seem to be much of a business case
>> for making them "proprietarily utilizable" (though we'd need some hard
>> data from digia on that matter). it would also enable us to use a lot of
>> qt translations from the kde community.
>>
>> one thing to consider is that some translators may not particularly like
>> the idea of using a proprietary web app for their work, so gerrit would
>> still need to be the authoritative repository with "normal" submissions
>> enabled. i think that's doable.
>>
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>
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