Transifex.net migration may lead to loss of our copyright headers

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 01:56:05PM -0300, Domingo Becker wrote:
> 2011/2/25 Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>:
> > On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 07:15:00PM -0500, Manuel Eduardo Ospina Sarmiento wrote:
> >> > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Dimitris Glezos <glezos at indifex.com> wrote:
> >> > > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Ville-Pekka Vainio
> >> > > <vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
> >> > >> It was brought to our attention by a Mageia translator on #fedora-l10n
> >> > >> today, that the new version of Transifex does not leave the copyright
> >> > >> headers in po files intact.
> >> > >
> >> > > FYI -- We are tracking the issue on this ticket (vpv already added
> >> > > some useful comments on it):
> >> > >
> >> > >  http://trac.transifex.org/ticket/675
> >> >
> >> > Since that ticket is more generally about the treatment of comments, I
> >> > didn't add this issue there, but for Fedora translations, are we able
> >> > to ensure the copyright notice reads at a minimum, "Copyright (C)
> >> > <year> Red Hat, Inc. and others"?
> >>
> >> Is this enough? will we lose the name of the translators that have
> >> worked since 1998 and put "others" instead?
> >
> > Sorry, I didn't mean to imply or express whether we'd lose anything or
> > not.  I simply wanted to point out the copyright notice itself should
> > *at least* say that Red Hat is not the only copyright owner.  It would
> > be ideal if translators were all listed.  As I understand it that
> > listing would not be terribly difficult to add as a feature.
> 
> 
> This has been discussed before [1] and [2], and it comes from 2006.
> 
> Let's talk about a long term solution for this, again.
> 
> It is useless to have comments that will be removed from the po file
> by the po compiler. They will not be present in the rpm package nor in
> the published document (using publican).
> 
> The copyright message may be solved with a LICENSE file in the whole
> project together with the source files in the source tree.
> 
> The translator history is another different story. It is used
> sometimes by translators (although mostly not used), and, if it is
> well implemented, it may serve for acknowledging translators for their
> work.
> 
> If I may choose here, I prefer a string like "translator-credits",
> which end up in the application like they do in gpk-application or
> system-config-printer, and the only translators shown are the ones for
> the current selected locale.
> 
> A po file editor like poEdit doesn't show the comments at the
> beginning of the po file, one would need to open the .po file with
> gedit to see them. However, all po file editor have a search tool, and
> a translator should only know what string to search for to see the
> translation history and modify it accordingly.
> 
> With a document managed with publican, there might be a string like
> that too, in a section like "<para>translator-credits</para>" in the
> xml file for a chapter, just like the Colophon chapter/section Paul
> once proposed [3]. I saw it is possible to implement. I will ask
> Guillermo Gomez (gomix) to implement it in the Software Management
> Guide, just for the proof of concept.
> 
> So, the copyright message in a comment in a source file can be solved
> with a LICENSE file in the source tree, the same way it is done with
> some Fedora packages where the license is missing in the source code.
> 
> The translator history clearly needs a solution outside Tx. It only
> needs developers and doc-writers care for the L10N people who will
> contribute translating their work.
> 
> [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-April/msg00174.html
> 
> [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue174#Document_Colophon
> 
> [3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2008-March/msg00132.html

I heard jsmith say on IRC earlier today, but didn't see him post here
about it, so apologies if this is old news.  DocBook lets you use:

  <articleinfo>
    ...
    <othercredit role="translator">Domingo Becker</othercredit>
    ...
  </articleinfo>

I haven't used Publican in a while now and it's been through several
revisions.  Does anyone know how it treats these entries, off the top
of their head?

I agree the hard work of translators should be recognized wherever
possible!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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