Moving OOo translation project over to Rosetta/Launchpad

[Jordi Mallach]

Hey Tim!

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 02:12:24AM +0000, Tim Morley wrote:
> I've been leading a l10n project at OpenOffice.org for a while, and we've been
> looking for some sort of platform to coordinate the distributed translation
> effort.
> 
> Launchpad/Rosetta seems to go a good way to providing what we want, but there
> are two things which I think are feature requests. (At least, I couldn't find
> the features, having just used Launchpad for an hour or so). Forgive me if I'm
> going over old ground, and feel free to reply with just URLs pointing to the
> answers to my questions, if they've already been answered in detail elsewhere.

Thanks for your interest in Rosetta. At least one other team has
successfully worked on translating OpenOffice.org using Rosetta, (the
Kurdish team), and we're happy to get interest from other teams.

How many active translators are there in the Esperanto team right now?

> Feature Request 1, an absolute must-have: our existing .po files are packed
> full of comments, showing queries from one translator, answers from another
> with references to source code files, etc. The comments clearly show other
> translators how reliable a particular translation is, i.e. whether it's just a
> first idea by an inexperienced team member, or a pretty good guess, or the best
> we can come up with but we're open to suggestions, or something close to
> perfection, cross-referenced with a dozen other languages and with source code
> references too. Without the comments (and I think I'm right in saying that the
> comments are at least hidden, if not thrown away completely), all we've got is
> some words, which may or may not need further attention.
> 
> I'm well aware of the fuzzy tag, but this is a very blunt instrument and not
> even close to what we need.

Rosetta won't throw away this information, of course! The current
version of Rosetta can and will show both translator and programmer
comments in the interface. The current limitation that would bite you is
that while you can see them, you can't edit them to add more.

We have thought about how to support this in a clever way, but the UI is
tricky to get right for this feature.

> Feature Request 2, a would-be-nice-to-have: it'd be good to know *who*
> translated *what*, not just who worked on a particular file last. I realise I'm
> probably asking rather a lot on this one, but it's very useful information,
> particularly in a small team, with some dedicated, experienced and meticulous
> translators (i.e. whose work is a joy to proof-read because there's so little
> to change), and some members who are, shall we say, lacking in one or more of
> the above areas.

Rosetta stores which launchpad user submitted which translation, for all
projects. We currently just show a list of the people who have
contributed to a certain translation, and who was the last contributor.
We don't show what you're looking for, but the information is in the
database. If there's a big demand, we might be able to use it somehow.
That shouldn't be a too difficult feature.

> I've also got a question: is it easy enough to upload the .po files we've done
> so far to Rosetta?

It is very easy. It's a matter of browsing to the template you're
working on and selecting a file from your hard drive using your web
browser. Rosetta will import it and it will appear in the system.

Thanks for your interest. We hope to see Esperanto OpenOffice.org
translators using Rosetta soon, and hopefully many other teams will
follow!

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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