question regarding feedback of launchpad translation suggestions

[Ask Hjorth Larsen]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Oier Mees <oier89rider at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> I know I am not the first one with this issue but I would like to know if
> anybody is working on providing some sort of feedback for people who do
> translation suggestions on Launchpad. Some sort of optional notification
> when the suggestion gets reviewed would be great because otherwise they can
> think that their suggestions are ignored and feel that they are wasting
> their time. Besides an option to inform them about what kind of mistakes
> they are making for instance would also be good, but I don't know how could
> this fit without introducing too much clutter in the UI.
> Regards,
> Oier Mees

This is also a function I have requested on a previous occasion
(hopefully people aren't too tired of listening to me - but I think
all of our translators would really like this), so I will take the
liberty of explaining exactly why I think this is so important.

In our group, when not using Launchpad, we normally translate by
sending po-files in e-mails.  A proofreader then goes through and
writes comments/corrections as appropriate, sending this back to the
translator.  The translator then makes the necessary changes and sends
the po-file to be committed.  This is straightforward and doesn't
require opening many programmes at once.

When using Launchpad, someone writes suggestions for a module and then
sends an email with a link, saying that 'this is to be reviewed'.  The
reviewer then looks through and accepts the strings, except where
something should be changed.  If something should be changed, the
reviewer will either write a new suggestion, or will simply
correct-and-accept the existing one.  In either case we need to
communicate to the translator what the *reasons* are for these
changes.  As it is impossible to annotate these suggestions/reviews in
Launchpad, we then have to write a separate e-mail and somehow link to
the strings to which the comments apply.  So you have to do a lot of
multitasking back and forth between e-mail programme and browser.

(Alternatively one could simply correct-and-accept strings without
communicating back to the translator, but we don't do that, because
then we would have no contributors.)

What we would like is a text field in which to write a message that
accompanies a string review (or a new suggestion).

(For what it's worth, I think this is slightly less important than
supporting the comment feature of gettext, which would enable comments
to individual strings.)

There's a bug about this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/25

Regards
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