Rosetta

[Dafydd Harries]

Dwayne Bailey had a look at Rosetta recently, and I thought I'd forward
his comments to the list, along with some replies from me. This feedback
is really useful -- thanks Dwayne!

Ar 16/09/2004 am 00:56, ysgrifennodd Dwayne Bailey:
> I like
> ------
> - The dashboard - although formating got wonky on some pages

I think the dashboard has been improved since you looked at it.

> - Personal list of projects
> - Suggest a project
> - Download PO files to translate offline or translate online
> 
> 
> Don't like
> ----------
> - Multiple languages shown in the translation interface.  More likely to
> create bad translations then assist

I'm sure we could improve the interface for the common case of
translating into one language at a time.

We're planning to develop a feature where one can display multiple
languages in a read-only mode. For example, a translator for Brazilian
Portuguese might well find existing translations for Portuguese from
Portugal useful while translating.

> - Getting to the translation interface was quite complicated,  Would be
> nice to be there almost straight away.

Agreed, the navigation is a bit clumsy.

I'm hoping this is mitigated by the fact that once you've found the
right template for the first time, it can be added to your list and will
show up on your dashboard.

> Would like
> ----------
> - More stats on dashboard like rate of change expected date of
> completion, etc

These would indeed be useful. A simple indicator of how complete a file
is on the translation page would also be useful.

> - An idea of what the target for a package is

In terms of percentage complete?

> - More aids on the translation interface (highlighting cues - eg
> variables, HTML, etc are different colours; pre-commit checks - eg
> accelerator checks, variables correct to stop errors early)

Absolutely. Hilighting interpolation sequences should be fairly easy.
These messages will have the c-format flag set. Detecting XML/HTML would
be a little trickier, but it's certainly doable.

Checking translations before they are written to the database is
definitely something we need to do.

> Couldn't really check
> ---------------------
> - Translation interface - got errors on commit

Are you still getting these errors? Hopefully they'll be fixed by now.

> - How you determine readiness

What do you mean by "readiness"?

> - How you handle project such as Gnome and KDE which have hierarchical
> groupings of translation files vs Evolution or smaller projects which
> usually only have one file.

There's still work to be done on handling large projects well, but we
have some ideas on how to do it.

> - How you store stuff in the backend

All our data is stored in a Postgres database.

> - How you would interact with the upstream projects localisation effort.

The need to work well with translators working outside of Rosetta is
something we're very aware of.

> - One translation section indicated missing plural info so not sure how
> you would handle plurals

Plural forms are something which it's very difficult to present in an
obvious fashion. I think users will need to learn what plural forms are
in general and what the plural forms are for their particular languages.
Of course, if Rosetta can help the user to understand it, then by all
means it should.

> - KDE and gettext style comments not sure how these would come through
> in the interface.

This is something we're planning to add soon.

-- 
Dafydd