rosetta vs. upstream translations [InternationalisationDiscussion]

[Jordi Mallach]

Hey Simon,

On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 01:21:37PM -0800, Simon Michael wrote:
> I've successfully uploaded the latest Zwiki 0.49 pot and po files to rosetta,
> after re-sending two files to Jordi Mallach. It's a manual process on their
> end, and so takes a while. It seems not as smart as I had expected about
> merging. For example, the zwiki-fr.po on rosetta had a bunch of translations
> changed by Nicolas Velin, indicated by blue in the status bar. zwiki-fr.po in
> darcs had a bunch of changes by Encolpe Degoute. By uploading it we overwrote
> most of Nicolas' work (I think). The site is so slick that I assumed it would
> do something really smart here (remember the alternate translations or
> something). There are indeed two different kinds of upload you can do, but I
> don't understand them; they might select which version takes precedence. I did
> download a copy of the rosetta files yesterday in case of trouble.

I think you got a more clear idea of how this worked when we talked on
IRC. When you do a user upload, the translations will take precedence to
those stored as "published" in the database. If you do a "published
upload" (ie, a file that came from a tar.gz), if there are two different
strings to chose from, what is in Rosetta will have precedence.

If some strings are "discarded" in a published upload, the translations
are not lost, though. Rosetta will remember them, and will show them as
suggestions next to the other know alternatives for that string. I hope
that is smart enough :)

> The recommendation at this stage seems to be: if you use rosetta for your
> project, all your translations should be added via rosetta. In fact that might
> help our process more than it hurts, and I think it's worth considering.

Well, it would be the same thing if instead of Rosetta it was two
persons working in parallel. Ie, you release your shiny new ZWiki 0.50,
and two different persons in the Pyrenees decide they are going to
translate it to Occitan. An occitan translation doesn't exist, and you
suddenly get two different translations from two different people. What
would you do? Rosetta can't decide which translation is better, so the
compromise is to keep what there is, and you can override that with a
user upload.

> Meanwhile right now I have
> 
> 1. latest translations from darcs, in darcs
> 
> 2. latest translations from darcs + some new and changed translations from
> rosetta, on rosetta
> 
> 3. more changed translations from rosetta, perhaps different from those in 2,
> in a tarball on my disk
> 
> and I'm not sure how to proceed, or even how to visualise the overlapping
> translations so I can see how much work would be lost if I throw away the
> tarball. Unfortunately I can no longer see rosetta's coloured status bars of
> yesterday. Obviously I don't want to trash the good work done by our new
> rosetta translators. :) Ideas welcome..

It's hard to say. If you know you trust some group of translators, keep
those. In general you should do something like

msgcat -o translation.po --use-first trusted-translation.po
less-trusted-translation.po untrusted-translation.po to make sure you
don't lose any message, while you give priority to the translations you
trust more.

If you have no way of judging which is a better translation, I guess
it's up to you. :)

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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