Sending translation back

[Carlos Perelló Marín]

Hi,

On Sun, 2005-06-19 at 22:59 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> tor 2005-06-16 klockan 09:33 +0100 skrev Mark Shuttleworth:
> > Christian Rose wrote:
> > 
> > >It would have been even better news if more had been done in order to
> > >improve interaction with upstreams that do *not* use Rosetta.
> >
> > We're getting pretty close to that. Shortly, we will be importing all of
> > upstreams translations on a regular basis, so that other people won't
> > unnecessarily duplicate the work of upstream. This will mean that
> > distros can keep track of upstream even in cases where upstream is not
> > working with Rosetta.
> > 
> > Sharing translations back with upstream at the moment is trivial:
> > upstream can download, at any time, any pofiles from Rosetta that they
> > want.
> 
> Well, from any upstream's situation, that is *not* trivial. Keeping
> track of what all downstream's are doing/modifying/producing is a huge
> amount of work, and applying the opposite workflow model isn't likely to
> be in any way successful.

I Agree.

> 
> 
> > We cannot commit pofiles directly into other projects CVS without
> > permission, and we cannot just spam the project translators with rosetta
> > po files, so making it all available for constant download strikes me as
> > being a reasonable step. We can also do the work to enable
> > subscriptions, so that an upstream only has to subscribe once and will
> > then receive a regular mailing of any po files that they want.
> > 
> > It's very difficult to "improve interaction with people who do not want
> > to talk to you by email, web or any other medium". If you have any
> > suggestions as to other ways we could improve interaction with projects
> > that are not using Rosetta, please let me know.
> 
> I believe much can be acheived right now simply by trying to make
> Rosetta translators aware, with big notices on the pages, that for the
> most part, their contributions will *not* automatically be contributed
> upstream. That's the case at least now, and it's better to be honest
> about it, instead of having contributed translations rotten away in
> Rosetta and never ever be useful to anyone else than Ubuntu.

True, we need to improve those kind of messages but we are not silent
about that. Every time we get a request to help translating Ubuntu or
any other project we make clear that they should coordinate with
upstream so the work is reused. I know we are far from have the perfect
system but we are on that path already, don't worry.


> 
> Perhaps this notice could then also be switched off for the projects
> where you*do* know that synchronization with upstream is in place.
> 
> In a second step, some solution for automatically contributing back
> translations to upstream can be acheived, e.g. by automatically sending
> the Last-Translators the improved translations in Rosetta, or by sending
> the upstream language team coordinators the completely new Rosetta
> translations. If you provide a method for the recepient to acknowledge
> that he or she wants these notices in the future, then you cannot be
> accused for spamming. You've done your best, that's all.

I was thinking about attach them as patches to the BTS so they don't get
lost. Do you think it's better to mail directly to 'Last-Translator'
entry?

> 
> Of course this needs some methods for extracting language team
> coordinator information from upstream -- I'm sure we can figure
> something out (e.g. an XML file format), at the very least in the case
> of GNOME.

Yeah, that would be really good, not only for Rosetta/Ubuntu but any
other distribution or translation project.

> 
> 
> Don't get me wrong -- I beleive Rosetta is an unprecented and *very*
> powerful tool. However, at the moment it is almost completely based on
> the needs from a downstream distribution (aggregation/completion), and
> doesn't help upstream much at all (the "contributing back" part), unless
> the upstream projects are also going to use Rosetta, which isn't likely
> to happen any time soon in many cases for a variety of reasons.

Christian, don't worry, we are trying to do our best to help any use
case related to translations but Rosetta is a young project to have all
features since first day.

> 
> Given that, if Rosetta pretends to be the "be all end all" translation
> project and attracts a lot of volunteers wanting to translate upstream
> projects in Rosetta, unknowing of the fact that their contributions are
> likely to stay trapped in Rosetta without ever getting upstream and used
> by others unless they actively do something themselves, and that, as a
> result, many contributions will be rotting away in Rosetta, then Rosetta
> isn't helpful to the larger community at all.


That's why we removed the option that lets anyone to import .pot files
into Rosetta and we review the request first so we reduce this problem.

We know that Rosetta will not be the unique place to do translations so
we are implementing ways to cooperate with other projects, it's a matter
of time to improve that.

Cheers.

> 
> 
> Christian
> 

-- 
Carlos Perelló Marín
Ubuntu Hoary (PowerPC)  => http://www.ubuntulinux.org
mailto:carlos.perello at canonical.com
http://carlos.pemas.net
Valencia - Spain
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