A few comments now that it's live

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 16/12/2004 am 16:53, ysgrifennodd Jordi Mallach:
> It's quite amazing that I've forgotten to mention this before, given I
> look at the licensing stuff quite closely, but it seems we never thought
> about adding a disclaimer somewhere before translators actually start
> editing files about the copyright of their contributions.
> 
> Is it legal to say "By using Rosetta, you agree to contribute everything
> you to translate under the same licence as the original messages were
> licenced under."? Ie, if you're translating GPL stuff, your translation
> is GPL.

Well, this implicitly happens when you submit a PO file to a project. By
default, gettext (or something else) includes a line at the top of the
file saying "This file is under the same licence as <package>." So,
Rosetta should have the same legal status as othe methods of submitting
translations.

> On another front; as soon as I imported the first of my projects, XQF, I
> found people were quickly taking it up for translation. It's worrying me
> that people start messing up with already made and correct translations
> since day one, so I was wondering how hard it will be to implement some
> measures against this possibility. One that comes to mind is
> assignments: having the possibility of locking a translation for a given
> translator who is known to be good and responsive. If someone else wants
> to edit, they need to get an unlock from the "language coordinator" (if
> that figure is planned at some point), product owner or the appointed,
> "safe" translator.

The Quality Assurance problem is one I'm painfully aware of. The problem
is getting the right balance of openness to new contributions and
preventing bad translations.

Some ideas:

 - Some sort of peer review system where translators explicitly approve
   other people's translations.

 - A notification system so that translators know when their
   translations have been modified.

Suggestions about how to tackle this problem are welcome.

-- 
Dafydd