Rosetta translation system

Tue May 9 19:45:54 BST 2006

Hi everyone!

I'll try to answer some of the questions that have rised in the thread
regarding Gaim's usage of Rosetta.

What Rosetta offers to Luke is a simpler interface to manage
translations. He just uses a webform to periodically update the Gaim pot
file. Time passes, and he wants to release. He clicks on another button,
and gets a nice tarball with all the work until that point.

QA issues with Rosetta

People have raised some concerns regarding QA on Rosetta. That's an
ongoing debate on the Rosetta community, and the team has made that a
priority fix for the next rosetta upgrades.

Access permission to translations can be open or closed, and translations
can be assigned to teams or be unassigned: if you're not a member of the
translator team assigned to that translation template, you won't be
able to translate the application.  The main "QA problem" is oversized
teams, or lack of team assignments. Until this point, people have been
added blindly to teams when they requested getting in, resulting on some
bad translators submitting bad new translations, or modifying valid
strings. The teams are now aware of this, and we're working on ways to
alleviate it.

We normally encourage product owners (Luke, in this case) to use the
"Ubuntu translators" teams, which are already taking care of translating
the Ubuntu distribution. I don't know how the Gaim translation teams are
structured, or how open they are. Can I go to the issue tracker and post
a patch to Portuguese? Will that be accepted more or less blindly, or
are there checks for the origin of that translation? Using the Ubuntu
translators teams would mean joining a set of already-established teams
which are already coordinated, have mailing lists, etc. It would also
mean less control over who can translate Gaim, depending on the team.

To address this, a possibility would be not to use the sometimes huge
Ubuntu translator teams, but a newly created Gaim translators group
which the leaders of the different language projects in this list could
control at will (ie, moderated teams).

What Rosetta would mean in terms of workflow changes

Basically, Rosetta is a huge translation database. In front of it,
there's an easy to use web interface to write the translations, which is
very desirable for newbie translators, as it hides the PO format away,
and makes it easy to translate from any computer, in any internet cafe,
without specialised tools. My experience is that it has helped us
getting translations from users of some Asian or African languages you
normally don't see so easily around your average project.

Rosetta won't try to enforce this web-based interface for experienced
translators, though. You can also choose to download the PO from the
site, hack on it offline with Emacs po-mode or KBabel and when you're
done upload it back to the system, where it'll be merged to the current
POT. In this case, the workflow changes a bit: right now I assume you
fetch the merged POT files from SVN, work on it, and then Gzip it and
attach it to SF trackers for LSchiere to take a look every now and then.
With rosetta, it'd mean requesting an export of your file, working on it
using your editor, and uploading it back using a webform. No issue
trackers.

More stuff:

Mişu Moldovan says using Rosetta would move Gaim to a site not
controlled by the project. I don't think that's too different from using
SourceForge, though. Also, Canonical guarantees the availability of the
translation work submitted to Rosetta via translation exports. Still,
this is a service operated by humans, and things might break, as they do
in SF (the mail archive of this mailing list isn't being archived, for
example).

He also raises a concern about the Ubuntucentricity of
Launchpad/Rosetta. LP has a number of features, some of them focused on
controlling the making of a professional distribution like Ubuntu.  This
means that part of Rosetta is thought to serve this purpose. It's not
Ubuntu centric, though. There are plans to host other non-Ubuntu related
distributions in the system, AFAIK. There's two places where Rosetta
holds translation templates: the "distros" and "products" tree.

Distro trees can track the templates for a number of distributions.
Currently, it holds old versions of gaim, specifically the very exact
templates that were released with past Ubuntu releases (this is because
Ubuntu translations can be updated months after the distribution release
via language packs).  For example, here's the version that will be
released with the next release, dapper:
<https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+source/gaim/+pots/gaim> Only
the Ubuntu gaim maintainer controls when this template changes, and it
does when a new package enters the distribution's archive.

There's also the "products" trees, which are controlled by the owners of
a product. In our case, LSchiere would control it, and would be able to
upload any template (SVN trunk, etc) whenever he likes.
<https://launchpad.net/products/gaim> (you'll see the Gaim product
already exists, registered by someone. That would be transfered to the
correct owner, of course).

We're working on a feature that will make it easy to share all the
translations between a "gaim template" in the product series tree and
in any of the distro trees the translator has permissions to write to.

I hope this addresses most of the doubts in the thread.

Thanks,
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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