[Ambassadors] Help improving translation
Hello,
First, I apologise to fedora-trans-list to mail this message again.
I have been translating fedora in French for few months only and i'm
facing problems with contributors' translations.
I used to translate po files, and, as we were very few French
translators (2 *only*), it was quite easy to ask for the mate to read
over the translation and to know what he is actually doing.
However, now that I have less free time and now that we are more than 2
translating Fedora into French, when I take the initiative to translate
2 or 3 missing or recently added strings, I met bad translation and
mistakes.
There are few problems in our translation process :
- People are not communicating by mailing list. The fact is that
translation is often seen as a lonely activity and that you don't need
any response from someone to take a po file and translate it. There is
no way to know who is working on what.
- The status page [1] are useful to know what has been translated, but
useless to know what has been read over.
- People do not use the reservation system "take" button and if they do,
they don't update they reservation.
What I'm planning to do : take every po file, and read over them until
FC7 comes out. This is the only way I found to avoid bad translation in
Fedora.
Any advice to help out ?
As we are changing lots of things on Fedora, wouldn't be the time to
improve the translation process :
- we shouldn't give anymore rights to upload CVS translation. CVS should
only be accessible in read only and only people that read translation
over should be allowed to update po to the CVS.
- as there is mailing list for modifications on CVS docs, we need a
mailing list as well for each language po modification. Mailing list are
easy to set up and do not consume any ressources.
- we could also use a system allowing to add a status of what has to be
done with a po file : "waiting for translation", "waiting for being read
over", "translation in progress" for example, are status that could be
used.
just my 2 cents.
[1] http://i18n.redhat.com/cgi-bin/i18n-status
--
Thomas Canniot
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ThomasCanniot