Re: Improving the translation process

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 6 février 2020 16:41:04 GMT-05:00, "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> a écrit :
>I think the Translation Project mailing lists are a good place to
>discuss translations and they should be recommended.  I am thankful to
>the German TP team’s Mario Blättermann for introducing me to the TP’s
>way of working and giving help.  Also it is good to look at the PO
>files collection at the TP to see how some word was translated in
>other software.
>
>However, this does not mean Guix needs to use the TP services for
>translation.  To me, the need to upload a tarball to the TP seems
>pointless.  Automated, regular upload of POT files would be very
>welcome.
>
>If Guix or Savannah decides on Weblate, the reason should be easier
>maintenance for the maintainers, which I cannot comment on.  Opinions
>on that would be interesting.
>
>I had never heard of Weblate, so I watched:
>
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVlXt6QdgdA
>
>Most things I don’t care about.  The speaker talks about non-technical
>people not downloading PO files.  I believe Guix translators need
>technical knowledge anyway to understand what they translate.  I do
>not believe sending emails is a problem for translators.  In my
>opinion, downloading PO files is the best way to search, diff and
>proofread.  I do not like that Javascript seems to be required to
>download and upload PO files via Weblate.  Adding automated checking
>for valid Texinfo would in a few cases be helpful, but is really
>needed only if Weblate were to commit automatically.
>
>I don’t think full machine translation is useful, in contrast to
>machine-aided dictionaries like:
>
>https://www.linguee.com/english-german/translation/proofread.html
>
>
>Thank you for all your efforts in improving translations!
>
>Regards,
>Florian

For maintainers: once in place, we won't need to manually generate tarballs and will be able to have more frequent updates.

Even if you are technically inclined, there is a cost to pay in learning the process to register at the TP, dodge the "do I need to sign a waiver?" question, get the file, know what to do with it, carefully read the page about the bot to know how to send it. Compare to weblate, where you need to register in a more familiar way, can edit online or offline (with a download and an upload button).

And I disagree you need to be technically inclined to translate guix: you don't need to when translating package descriptions (if you translate music software, you'll need to know what a fourrier transform is, and knowing computers won't help you there). You could also simply want to fix a typo (or a bunch of them ^^").

Maybe we don't need all these features, but it would also give translators a way to communicate and coordinate (more than one person on a project and language pair). Conversations are archived and linked to a specific string so others can find it when they want to translate.