Proposed string freeze exceptions
Milo Casagrande
milo at casagrande.name
Mon Oct 5 19:00:20 UTC 2009
2009/10/5 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
> There may be a misunderstanding here - we're not suggesting that the
> translators should be doing the reviewing after the string freeze.
No misunderstanding Matt, but looking at things now, looks like
translators are doing the reviewers. And am not saying it is wrong,
but that it is the wrong period. And the errors that are arising right
now, the kind of errors, IMHO, should have been caught earlier (not
saying that the doc team is doing a bad work, you are doing an
absolutely great work).
> We're discussing how we can ensure that reviewing is done (whether by
> translators or otherwise) before the string freeze in future release
> cycles.
Absolutely.
> The reason I picked on translators in this part of the email
> isn't because I want to overburden translators, it's just because we
> get a lot of high quality bug reports from translators immediately
> after string freeze, and I'd like to find a way to encourage that to
> happen earlier.
The only thing I'm thinking of, in order to have the maximum of two
goals (update and correct documentation, and complete translations),
is to try to enforce some kind of freeze on new content written and
start a review process before entering string freeze.
I would really like to hear other people's thoughts about this and
about having a review period.
> I'm not sure that 1 week is enough for review though.
Yes, maybe 1 week is not enough.
> I'd rather find
> a way to encourage translators to start working on translating the
> documentation quite a time (say three weeks) prior to string freeze on
> the basis that translators already have a lot of work to do in a short
> time, and if we can commit to having most documentation written
> earlier, subject to bug fixing, then hopefully that is enough to
> reassure the translators that they can save time by starting earlier.
Pros and cons. I'm not sure about saying to translators, in the worst
case scenario, "start translating early, but mind that you could end
up redoing that work in a couple of weeks". I tend to say to be
patient 'cause, really, things usually settle down 2-3 weeks prior
release date.
> The reality is that most of our documentation doesn't change, and it
> is present in Launchpad very early in the release cycle.
Yes, most of it is based on already translated strings too.
Ciao.
--
Milo Casagrande <milo at casagrande.name>
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