translations problems
Posted by Will Kahn-Greene
Our current status for translations is pretty rough. We support a lot of languages, but few of them are complete translations. See https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer/.
If you look at that page, you’ll notice most of the translations haven’t been updated and/or are missing strings. Of those translations, the only ones that are complete are English (United Kingdom), Norwegian Nynorsk, and Ukranian.
I think part of the problem is that we don’t have a good way of telling people that we need translation updates.
If you’re set up to do translation work or know someone who is, please take some time this weekend to update the translations for your language. We’re planning a Miro 1.2 release some time next week. Hundreds of thousands of people world-wide will appreciate what you’ve done.
Also, if there’s something that I can do to help make updating translations more timely, let me know.
2 Responses to “translations problems”
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March 13th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
1 week notice is way too short. Remember, most people willing to do help are doing this in their free time and probably act on impulse a la oh I have some time, I can have a go at this… Additionally, there is currently no possibility to test translations for stupid mistakes but to wait for a sync, which mostly only happens right before a release.
Launchpad’s web interface looks nice and all but really unsuitable for decent work. The pot downloads are at times only available for download after a download request (srsly wtf) after which the dispatch of a simple e-mail with the download link (no amount of wtfs can describe the stupidity of this process) may take up to a week (srsly WTF).
Suggestion:
- at the very very least 2 weeks before the eta of a new release a big fat notice now is the time to work on translations would get put out there.
- at least 1 week before release a sync should take place, so ao translators can test it during real usage instead of guessing what goes where and messing up.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I agree that a one-week notice is too short a period of time. I sent out an email to the develop mailing list asking people to tell translators that we need translations done and I told people on IRC as well.
I agree that translators need to be able to test translations. That’s why we did a sync earlier this week before rc0 and we did a sync earlier today for rc1. We’ll be doing similar things for future releases.
The part I don’t know–and the reason for the blog posting–is how reach the translators with release notices. We definitely need to fix this in the process.
Also, if you have suggestions for other translation systems to use, I’m game for looking into them–I don’t think we’re married to using Launchpad. My understanding is that all translation systems suck one way or another, so switching to a different system just switches problem sets.