If there were translation teams...

[Josep Puigdemont]

If there were translation teams, and I was the coordinator of my team...

  * I would encourage all translators to have a CVS account and commit
their changes, *provided* the file has been *reviewed* and *accepted* by
the rest of the members of the team.

  * I would encourage all translators to apply as maintainers for those
files that they are familiar with, either because they have translated
them before, or because they use them often, or for whatever reason. I
would still give priority to the last translator to be the maintainer if
he/she would like to.

  * I would make sure that whenever a file is "taken" or "released" the
team's mailing list, and specially the maintainer of a file, are
informed about it.

  * I would have more time to translate, and I would have to spend less
time coordinating the team, assigning files and keeping track of who's
doing what and for how long they have been doing it.


Roles:

*** Translator: the person translating a file at a given time.

*** Maintainer: is the person responsible to keep updated a file,
whenever it needs improvements. This person would be responsible for any
translation bugs on that file. He/she doesn't have to be the translator,
though. The translator might change over time, upon team member's
availability.
A Maintainer should be informed about translators taking their files,
and maybe maintainers should be able to commit at any time independently
of who's taken the file... (if possible)
Briefly, a maintainer is the person to contact for a certain file, and
it often happens to be its translator too.

*** Coordinator (team): the person to contact about anything related to
the translation of a certain language (as described in Christian Rose's
description of the GNOME Model¹). It is the maintainer of all those
files that have not yet a maintainer, or for whom s/he is the real
maintainer, of course. It will commit files and act as a maintainer on
behalf of translators that have no CVS account.
The coordinator coaches new translators (could be done by maintainers
too).
Possibly the coordinator should have full CVS access to any file that
belongs to its language.
The election of the coordinator is up to each team, any changes about
coordinator must be submitted to this mailing list.
The coordinator should be informed about changes in Maintainers.

Maybe there could be the role of the "translation project coordinator"
much like what Christian Rose is for the GNOME project, and which I
suppose falls into Sarah Wang right now.

Fedora translation page should have a description of the translation
process, teams, coordinators... you get the idea :)

All that... of course, if there were translation teams...

Briefly, combining teams with the new method have a lot of potential
that we should explote.

Again, this is only my view, and there might be flaws, if there are I
hope you can spot them and tell me :)

Best regards,

/Josep

Bernd: these might be the scriptures you were asking for :)

Note: not all members of a team have to be translators, there are also
proof readers, philologists, users, etc, and not all of them have to
have CVS access.

1)
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2004-June/msg00148.html