Ensuring Quality in Ubuntu Translations

Mario Meyer mariomeyer at ubuntu.com
Mon Apr 10 19:30:59 BST 2006


Hi Matthew,

We do have that kind of problem in the Brazilian team.. and we've been
working in a tutoring model, similar to the model you described for the
Italian team.. Although it's not easy for the mentor to keep track of
his pupil's translations, what you had already described in the Rosetta
problems..

We have a member in the Brazilian team that has been doing a GREAT job o
going trough already translated packages and correcting every mistake he
finds.. But that wouldn't be needed that much if we already had our QA
tutoring model working..

We'll be meeting in 2 weeks and might finish up preparing this QA
model... Any suggestions from other teams are welcome.. we really need
to get that in place to stop our duplicated translation work...

Mario Meyer

Matthew East escreveu:
> Sorry for the length of this email, I kinda wrote it as a blog post so
> it's a bit more wordy that I'd like.
>
> An interesting discussion on the #launchpad irc channel yesterday has
> been making me think about the question of quality assurance for Ubuntu
> translation teams. To put the question into context, this is how the
> discussion arose:
>
> An upstream GNOME translator for the Dutch language mentioned that often
> there are complaints on their mailing list about the quality of
> translations of the GNOME desktop environment for Ubuntu. He says that
> these flame wars are particularly irritating given that the translations
> complained of are not made by GNOME translators at all, but are
> introduced by the Ubuntu translation team, overwriting the upstream
> translations. One of the Ubuntu translation team joined the
> conversation, and it became clear that there was very little QA going on
> to ensure that the members of the Dutch team are (a) good translators,
> and (b) familiar with the GNOME and other upstream translation
> guidelines.
>
> Thanks to the two Dutch guys who made a lot of good points, some of
> which I've stolen in this post.
>
> This is a topic which has particularly interested me recently because
> the Italian translation group has been debating this question over the
> last few months, and has evolved a quality assurance technique to try
> and prevent this problem from happening. Also, I think this problem is
> not just with the Dutch team, but is likely to be common. I'd be
> interested to hear whether anyone else has experienced problems like
> this.
>
> Basically, my view is that the blame for this problem lies partly with
> Rosetta, and partly with the translation teams themselves. In reverse
> order:
>
> = Translation Teams =
>
> The basic starting point is that a central part of the Ubuntu
> philosophy[1] is that software should be available to all in their local
> language.
>
> [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/philosophy
>
> In order to achieve this, Ubuntu has given a lot of authority (and
> responsibility) to the various translation teams that exist in
> Launchpad[2]: these teams are responsible for what the operating system
> looks like, because the translations which they enter in Rosetta will
> eventually go into the operating system.
>
> [2] https://launchpad.net/people/?name=ubuntu-l10n&searchfor=teamsonly
>
> This is a lot of responsibility for the translation teams. It is clear
> that randomly accepting any new member to a team can result in bad
> translations. It seems that in the case of the Dutch team it has had
> really bad consequences. I refuse to believe that this problem doesn't
> exist elsewhere. For example, the Ubuntu French translation team has 250
> members (and 1 administrator to approve/disprove new candidates!!), the
> German team 86, the Brazilian team 78, etc. It's difficult to imagine
> that these members have all been through some kind of quality assurance.
>
> Upstream translators on the other hand _do_ go through rigorous quality
> assurance. Translations are uploaded to (e.g. GNOME) CVS if the
> translator is already well known for good quality translation, or
> alternatively if the individual translation is checked first.
>
> So how can Ubuntu translation teams do similar quality assurance? This
> is where teams should share their experiences, in my view. So here is
> what the Italian team does:
>  * When a new member applies to join, he's asked to join the mailing
> list and write a mail of presentation
>  * In order to be admitted to the group, the member goes through the
> following (relatively informal) process: 1. sign the code of conduct, 2.
> create a wiki page on the italian wiki with contact details, 3. read the
> upstream translation project guidelines, and the GNOME translation
> guidelines, 4. begin translating in rosetta by submitting "suggestions".
>  * When the proposed member has done #3 above, an existing member of the
> group checks the suggestions the proposed member has submitted. If they
> are ok, the proposed member becomes a real member.
>
> Now, this process may not work for every team. Some teams have lots of
> people, others not so many. Equally, this process is by no means perfect
> (I'd be very interested to hear what other teams do). It's up to each
> team to figure out what quality assurance system works for them.
> However, a quality assurance system IS necessary, if the problems like
> those experienced in the Dutch team are to be avoided.
>
> What concrete proposals could assist here? I'd suggest that some common
> "translator group guidelines" would do some good. But it's a very big
> job to "reform" existing groups, both in terms of the amount of work,
> and the delicacy of the social problems (it's important to get the
> balance right between encouraging inclusive participation, and quality
> assurance). However, if groups set up well thought out mechanisms for
> quality assurance, I feel convinced that it is a job which can be
> successfully carried out.
>
> = Rosetta =
>
> There are lots of ways in which Rosetta can and should help this QA
> process, in my opinion. They are all fairly well known bugs, I think.
> But they are important ones.
>
> The first is technical. It is not nearly as easy to check a proposed
> member's translations as it should be. This is a oft-cited bug in
> Rosetta. It should be possible to go to a person's profile, and view
> each suggestion that person has made for a translation. At the moment,
> it is only possible to view which template the person has contributed
> to, and then you have to go through all the untranslated strings for
> that template, and look for the person's name. Not very convenient.
>
> The second is technical too. You can't search a package for a particular
> string, which means that if you see a bad translation, it's harder to
> fix. Worse than that, once a translation is committed, there is no
> obvious way of seeing who committed the translation, so people who are
> not following guidelines cannot be approached to discuss the problem.
>
> The third is technical and social. It would be a bad thing to make
> upstream translations take precedence over Ubuntu translations (because
> then it would be impossible to correct mistakes upstream, or alter a
> translation where the context is slightly different in Ubuntu), but most
> of the problems are caused by the fact that upstream translations are
> not currently imported quickly enough into Rosetta. This results in
> Ubuntu translators translating strings which they otherwise would not
> touch, if the upstream translations were already there. Earlier
> importing of upstream translations would save much of the pain that
> Dutch Ubuntu users have experienced, I'll guess. (The social aspect of
> this is that Ubuntu translation teams should AVOID translating until
> they know that all upstream translations have been imported).
>
> The fourth is purely social. The main reason that translation groups
> don't do QA is that they are not aware of this need. Given that Ubuntu
> has given the translator groups this immense responsibility, it is their
> duty (and by implication, that of Rosetta/Launchpad) to make them aware
> of it. New teams and team owners/administrators should be made aware of
> the importance of assuring quality translations in the distribution. The
> other reason that Rosetta needs to take on this social task is that
> Rosetta really does make translation very very easy indeed, which rocks.
> However, it's vital to ensure that "easy" doesn't equate to "sloppy".
>
> = Conclusion =
>
> My conclusion is that Rosetta helps to go half way towards fulfilling
> the promise in Ubuntu's philosophy of making the operating system
> available to users in their local language. However, now for the hard
> bit: making the operating system available to users in their local
> language and _professional_ at the same time. In order to do this,
> translation teams need to put quality assurance in place and Rosetta
> needs to help them to do this.
>
> Matt
>   

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