On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 03:33:19AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
You're right, it's certainly not 115 very active teams, even though almost all of them are active to some degree. Anyway, when I browsed through the Inkscape po files I found that many of them essentially dated back to the Sodipodi days, so while Inkscape certainly hasn't a big shortage on translations, it seems the situation hasn't been as improving as it could have been doing during the time.
This is true; also the number of translated languages hasn't increased for a very long time.
Judging from http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.12/index.html, GNOME has 52 languages that have translation ratios over 50%. Do you think that would be a reasonable estimate for the number of translations Inkscape could expect to have if it were to tap into this resource?
Translation looks to be pretty simple - for a given language there is just one file to update. Certainly that file is important, but important enough to warrant changing CVS? I guess I'm unclear on particularly why GNOME CVS makes translation so much easier?
I guess I failed to communicate the most important issue here. That issue is:
- Since you're essentially doing your sort of own translation
project with Inkscape, how do you solve issues of translation quality control and peer review?
In other words, what would stop someone else from submitting a poorer Swedish Inkscape translation and having it committed, just weeks after I sent in mine? Do you keep track of your translations and who translates into what language? Do you ask people to confirm that they are ok with translations? Do you ask multiple volunteers for any language to get in contact with each other and sort issues out themselves, or do you just hope that any latest translation sent in by anyone is the one to commit, and hope that any issues will be caught by end users after the next Inkscape release?
These are all good questions, can you explain how the GNOME translation project handles these things? (I didn't see them explicitly explained on the URL you gave.)
Note that the Inkscape Translation team does much more than just translate the software. They also do great work at translating the SVG tutorials and the Inkscape Manual.
Since Inkscape has previous connections to GNOME (using some GNOME technologies, following the HIG, etc.) I thought that using the GNOME Translation Project would be the best choice. However, using the GNOME Translation Project requires that the software be in GNOME CVS. It's simply not feasible for us to educate hundreds of translators how to update a translation in a completely different CVS repository, make them have access to that different CVS, and adopt all our automatic tools (like the translation status pages at http://l10n-status.gnome.org/) to work with that different CVS as well.
What ways exist that would allow your team to do the translations in GNOME CVS without requiring the entire Inkscape project to change CVS systems? Even an approach that was partly manual or otherwise imperfect might at least allow your team to improve Inkscape's state of translation.
Do the translators only work on the .po files, or do they make modifications to files in the codebase itself (e.g. to adjust the original strings)?
Now, we *have* seriously considered switching how we manage source code, but I think the general concensus is that we want to move *away* from CVS to something like Subversion, that would give us more powerful code management. Our hope is that SourceForge will eventually implement this, although since SF seems to be taking a long time to get this, I think we'd consider other Subversion providers.
GNOME is currently considering a switch to a replacement for CVS. It's being discussed on the gnome-hackers list (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/). Subversion and Arch seems (according to my analysis of the threads) to be the main contenders, although Subversion seems to be the favorite since it has the benefit of being more close to how CVS works.
Interesting, well like I said, if GNOME were to provide Subversion, Inkscape would be very interested in switching to it. Maybe this would be the best way to go? Fwiw, we'd be willing to be beta-testers for the service if it were available.
Anyway, you may be right that it would make things more convenient for the GNOME translators, and it's possible that would gain us more translations. On the other hand, it risks making it more difficult for new developers to get CVS accounts, would take a lot of effort to migrate,
As for making sure CVS repository files get imported and making sure accounts get arranged, I promise that I'll help out as much as I can.
If you don't trust my word for it, please ask other people who maintain software in cvs.gnome.org, and what their experiences are on getting CVS accounts arranged for the last year or so. :)
We have over 30 users with CVS access - what would be the process of getting them access? Would each of them have to re-apply for access, or could it be done magically in bulk?
Bryce