Ensuring Quality in Ubuntu Translations

[kiko at async.com.br]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 05:19:13PM +0100, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 09.11.2006, 14:15 +0530 schrieb amachu techie:
> > >That is why I wrote a small guide that
> > >explains your translating process and encourages new users to get in
> > >contact with us before starting to translate. 
> >  
> > But how are you tackling when some one keeps translating without
> > joining or contacting the German Team.
> 
> It is quite sad, but you cannot help people that don't read the
> documentation :) A solution could be to make us more visible, like a
> banner in Rosettas translation entry page or the possibilty for LoCo
> teams to create language specific start pages in Rosetta.
> 
> I am unsure if the translation suggestion should be limited to a special
> team. Mostly we fail to bind people to our team: novice translators work
> on a small subset of a product. And after the review you don't hear of
> them again :/ So managing such a team would add a lot of administrative
> work.

The issue that I see with our current organization of translation teams
is really highlighted by your email. In your case you seem to be saying
that you /want/ inexperienced users to be a part of the translation
team; however the way Rosetta currently works you want inexperienced
users /far away/ from your translation team, because they have the power
of approving translations, a job which they can't do well until they
have experience translating.

The underlying problem, AFAICT, is that we are using translation teams
for two different things:

    1. To group the people who /can/ translate for a certain language
       (such as the novice contributors you cite above).

    2. To define a set of people who are /very good at/ translating for
       a certain language. This group of people will be allowed to
       approve translations that actually go into the application and
       language packs. It should be small (think 10 not 100) and
       experienced for your translation effort to have a reasonable
       level of quality.

Because we only have one team per language today, the result is that
some language efforts use the team for purpose 1, and others for purpose
2, and others for both 1 and 2 at once. This is one of the reasons why
Rosetta is perceived by upstream to produce low quality translations --
it's because the current language teams are too big and there is too
little accountability.

I think the proper solution is either to specify two teams, or to
specify levels of permission inside the teams. Specifying levels of
permission is a /lot/ harder to implement in Launchpad, though, and a
solution for a second team may be the best way to go ahead. So for a
specific language team, for each language, we'd have two teams
associated, one for each purpose above.

This needs to be coupled with a good review interface to allow the
people that are approving translations to not take forever to review
suggestions and then edit/approve them.

You imply in your last paragraph that there may be a twist to this, in
that you only want to let people add /suggestions/ if they are a member
of the language team. I don't know if I think that's a good idea;
suggestions come from other contexts as well ("suggested elsewhere", for
instance) and you don't want a higher barrier to entry to add
suggestions.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331