10/03/2012 08:45 sgrìobh Rob Weir
1) We know who made the contribution. This is good from IP
perspective, but also from a community perspective. Contributors
should get recognition for their work. If they can only contribute
anonymously, this is a problem. It also hinders the PMC from
recognizing active contributors and offering them committer rights.
<shrugs> that never seems to have been a problem previously. There
usually are many more translators, some who contribute only one or two
translations, than can be listed.
3) We need some mechanism for a Committer to review and commit
contributed translations. This doesn't necessarily mean that we must
have committers that can read 110 different languages. But it does
mean that we need a process that a Committer can follow to ensure that
the translations are of sufficient quality to be included in a
release. An example of such a process could be:
a) Committer verifies the origin of the translation strings,e.g., they
came from Pootle server from known contributors.
That doesn't ensure anything. I could regularly contribue stuff that
looks very much like, say, Navajo but no one has any way of knowing if
it's good or bad if I'm the only one providing Navajo transalations.
c) At this point the language strings are considered "candidates" and
the committer can check the strings into SVN. They are included in dev
snapshots as "candidate" translations, but they are not yet included
in releases yet.
That will result in very long delays cause you're in effect doing the
same job twice and I can't see a language like Gaelic or Bambara being
very high up anyone's list of priorities.
d) We have some sort of community review procedure. We rely on native
speakers to test the translations.
And how do you identify native speakers? Especially for smaller
languages, localization work is often done by fluent learners anyway,
it's just the sociolinguistics of the small languages.
We probably need a proactive RTC rather than lazy consensus. So maybe
we just wait until we get 3 +1's votes from volunteers who have tested
the translation. When we have that, then the translation becomes
"approved" rather than "candidate".
Again, that dooms small languages. How many times do I need to repeat
that with all the pushing in the world, small languages usually consist
of a team of 1, maybe two. If I had to wait for 2+ votes on any Gaelic
localization I've been involved in, I'd still be waiting for a release.
Two years on, I have a team of two who will, if they have the time,
install a pre-release and do some light testing and I already consider
myself lucky having them.
May I ask why you're trying so hard to change a model that worked
reasonably well before?
Michael
