[Slapt-get-devel] transifex for translations

Igor Murzov intergalactic.anonymous at gmail.com
Sun Sep 30 11:10:10 EDT 2012


> Not much to explain to translators really. "Use the transifex web
> interface" is the only advice that can be given.
> 
> 
> > I took a look at transifex and I can't find anything useful here,
> > except of the translating on the web.
> 
> 
> transifex is a central hub for translations. It provides a web interface to
> help with translating, but that's not all there is to it. One of the
> advantages of transifex is that many people can collaborate on the same
> translation, making it a lot easier to translate medium to big size
> projects like slapt-get and gslapt. It doesn't all fall on a single
> translator.

People can collaborate in many different ways without transifex.
And slapt-get is not medium to big size project.

> Translators can monitor progress and see where their work is
> needed, add/upload translations, ask for reviews if they're not sure, have
> their translations reviewed.

I can do all these without transifex.

> One other great advantage is that it makes
> life for the software developers a lot easier. They don't have to do manual
> work for every single change in the translations, they need only run a
> single command and have all the latest translations merged in their
> software. 

Really? What I see is that commit:

commit 664e3d7d6b24fe5f0e819e72c3d3c436c5e37ef0
Author: Jason Woodward <woodwardj at jaos.org>
Date:   Mon Sep 24 01:33:54 2012 +0000

    translation updates pulled from transifex

broke line wrapping and broke header in po/ru.po and others,
which is not very kind. Moreover, it changed the number of plural
forms in po/ja.po. Was it intentional? Was it a mistake? Nobody
knows, because the only comment we can see is "translation updates
pulled from transifex"! Is that ok?

> I personally have over 30 projects on transifex (not really sure
> about the number, it could be bigger). It would have been a complete
> nightmare to try to manage all of them manually with email submissions.

Good for you.

> BTW, you can also download the po file you're interested in, translate in
> the way you're used to locally (offline if you like) and when you're done
> with it you can just upload it to transifex.

That is forcing people to use this service.

> > But I believe that there are
> > no slackware users, that don't know how to edit files and create
> > patches locally.
> >
> 
> Want to bet? In any case, even if that was true, transifex also checks your
> translations for errors, so there is no way you'll submit a malformed po
> file. Before you say that this is not going to happen because slackware
> people just don't do that, you should know that there were already a few
> slapt-get translations which were broken due to malformed po files and
> apparently nobody had noticed. They were fixed because of the transition to
> transifex.
> 
> Not to mention that a lot of people find a web interface a lot friendlier
> and easier to use. I personally use transifex even for my own software. I
> always use the web interface, even when the latest po file is right there
> in front of me.
> 
> >
> > I would like to not register on transifex, and i'm asking you to
> > abandon any updates to russian translation. I would like to get
> > patches on the mailing list to review them.
> >
> 
> You have every right to refuse to register in any website. As Jason said,
> you can still continue using your old workflow with translating locally and
> sending patches. Nobody stops you from doing that. But please consider that
> it would be easier for Jason if you just used transifex, he wouldn't need
> to worry about and manage your translations manually, even if it's possible
> to do it.

You are speaking for other people. Don't do this.

> You should also keep in mind that translations in transifex can
> be ahead of the translations in git, so you should check the latest
> translation on transifex before you start translating anything. Maybe
> somebody else has already done the work you're about to do. You don't have
> to register to check upon existing translations or downloading their latest
> versions.

And you are forcing me to use transifex again, and I haven't
seen any positive impact from transifex by now. Transifex
actually makes me worry more about silent breakages from
its services or from other people. What I'm asking for is to
remove russian translation from transifex completely and let me
deal with it the old way.

> What transifex helps with, is that it lifts the burden of maintaining
> translations from the developer. Let the developers worry about their code
> and let the translators worry about translations. ;)
> 
> George


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