Hi there,

I would like to introduce you some changes that I am going to do on the
Websites, that will change a bit the way your are managing the translations.

It is not fixed yet, please give me your thoughts if you think that we need to
improve some parts, remove others or just stick with my proposal.
Don't be afraid, I won't introduce major changes! Oh wait, in fact I will (see
point 5 if you don't want to read this email completly!)

Here are the ideas, with an approximated schedule:

1. We have been pulling all translations twice hourly for years now from
transifex.net (twice because we use staging). That is a slow process, and not
really needed.
Therefore we have started to only pull the translations daily, once (shared
between stg and prod). This is effective only on staging actually, and will move
to production soon. It is transparent on your side, but the fact that we pull
the translations only once a day. You've been warned, now when you translate on
transifex.net, it will only appear on the websites the day after.
This could be moved to daily during string freeze, or a week before the
release. Please tell us if it's needed (I don't think it's really needed but
give your voice).
Of course, if you've made a terrible mistake and something is bad on your
translation, you'll need to wait untill the next day. This is bad. Try to think
if it could happen. But you should really proofread your translations, and I am
sure that you will never get this problem :)
The POs files on the websites repository won't be used at build time. We get the
POs directly from Transifex from inside our infrastructure.
I need your help to check that it is working as it should. Please, translate on
master, and proofread on stg.fedoraproject.org, spins.stg.fedoraproject.org,
start.stg.fedoraproject.org and so on. I would like to be sure that with new
POs it still work. (I can check it but your help is appreciated).

(1.) Expected change by the 13th of Feb

2. Because the POs on the git repo won't be used at build time, they are
probably going to be removed from the repo. Since Transifex keep an history and
the push access are spread between teams, there should not be any really bad
situation (like wrong language overriding). We could keep them here for the
websites team, as we need to test some language build, but I think we will
remove them shortly (as I have seen some commit on Transifex to enable pulling
without being logged in).

(2.) Expected change by the 13th of March

3. Our translation process at release time is not the best. We used to create
alpha, beta and master branches for some websites (mainly fpo and spins.fpo) to
let you translate and review the websites on stg before the release. To do this,
we copyied the translations from the previous branch (master to alpha, alpha to
beta and then beta to master) but doing this:
* The maintainer get the translations credits by Transifex.
* The string history is lost.
* We are all lost because only people on the infra team could know where we are
  pulling translations, and on which branch we build the websites.

I already spoke about a new process months ago. Here is a formal introduction:
* We will use only one Transifex resource per website.
* Once we decide to prepare the websites for next release (alpha, beta, finale),
  we will freeze the POs on prod (let's take as example alpha, if we are ready
  to move to beta) and push the upcoming POT to the current release. You'll then
  be able to translate the "new" website on the usual resource. You'll keep your
  translation history, the credits etc.
* At the release date (for example for beta), we will just enable again pulling
  the POs which would be up to date.

This does not change to much to you as we used to lock the translations during
the freeze, to avoid lost of translations when moved to the next stage (i.e
beta).

Of course, we always try to avoid string freeze break, but again, we depend on
marketing, docs, design, SIGs.. At every release we are making our websites
stronger, which leads to more quality for you.

(3.) Expected change for the F19 Alpha release

4. To let you work on new languages or new websites without loosing the visitors
with a too light translation, we will start pulling only PO files translated at
least with 30% of completion. Please tell me if 30% is too small, 50% could be
fine but I am not sure if we want to make this websites dependant (like 50% of
start.fpo Vs 50% of spins.fedoraproject.org).
With this, a visitor won't be able to select the foo language is the website is
not translated at more than 30% for this specific language.
This is valide for production and staging, we won't be able to separate those
because of the point 1. explained above.

(4.) Expected change by the 13th of Feb

5. There has been a good unknown Transifex feature for months now. The ability
to review translations. I still don't like the way it is implemented: the
maitainer (devs) has to choose for the translator the quality desired. No, it
should come from the translation team. But let move this discussion on an other
thread, later.
Here, on the websites team, we are going to pull reviewed translations only.
That is going to be a *huge* change for you. Therefore, we can probably enable
this feature for specific teams only. I don't know yet how this would be set.
Please every coordinators, tell me if this is something that you don't want for
your team. The downside of this change is the need for your team to mark as
reviewed all your translations.
It could have changed (I did the feature request 3 or 4 months ago)− and don't
ask me which ticket is it, I just can't track them all on their 3 different
trackers) but here is how it works:
* to review a string, you need to do it through the online translation tool
  (Lotte) only. You can't authomatize that with the transifex client.
* this is by-string or by-page process. You can't mark as review the whole
  resource or project. I let you imagine how to mark as reviewed a project with
  several rersources made of thousand of strings... Thanks to Transifex, the
  hot feature is a pain to start with. That's mainly why we haven't used that
  before, but I got the request to do so and it will add more quality to your
  translations. I strongly hope the made something to help us starting.
* only reviewers can review strings. So the language coordinators have to select
  some reviewers. A reviewer is a translator that have one more power, the
  hability to mark strings as reviewed. You can define them all as reviewers of
  course.

(5.) Expected change for the F19 Alpha release. But it really depends if we need
to do this per language, and about your opinion. This is really the major change
for you and we won't move forward on this topic if you don't want this for your
team. That's why I need you to let me know if you don't want this. Yeah, if you
don't reply for your team because you haven't read about this I will assume that
you agreed :) We will choose the best solution for you!  (I shall probably send
a reminder..)

Hope you are going to find those point nice, tell me if it's not clear or if you
have better ideas, or if I am missing something.