Matthew East wrote:
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Jeroen Vermeulen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
It largely depends on how much of the overall translation work the pending
imports will cover. The lower the ratio, the more sense it makes to
prioritize the templates.
Ok, I don't really understand this, because I would have thought that
all new strings are worth having in the interface asap before po
files, on the assumption that merging the outstanding pot files in the
queue probably wouldn't take that long (how many imports does
Launchpad get through per day?)
At the moment we're importing about 2k-5k files per day, although
variability is huge. Most of the remaining files are OpenOffice updates
or newer uploads.
The problem with importing templates long before their uploaded
translations is the risk of redundant translation work. It might sound
like the sort of problem you'd like to have, but actually we've found
that it generates some very painful problem patterns:
1. Translators do lots of work, but their suggestions are not accepted
because the messages they translated also turn out to be covered by the
upstream imports. So they find back nothing of their own work in the
end result and feel rightfully frustrated.
2. Some of those translators then mistakenly identify not being a member
of an Ubuntu translation team as the root problem, and sometimes file
membership applications as Rosetta questions.
3. Translations are accepted and then override the upstream ones that
are imported later, leading to complaints about unwarranted forking of
the translations, bug reports, demands that we block this or remove
that, and so on. I've even had someone from a translation team ask me:
who reviews our translations and decides what goes into Ubuntu?
4. People experiencing this find it hard to get to the places where
their effort is going to be most useful, especially without good team
coordination, and come up with ideas for fixing this in the UI. They
are often good ideas, often overlapping or conflicting ones, never
perfect solutions. And so far we never quite get around to choosing
ones and implementing them.
A lot of the fallout ends up with us, the application developers, even
when some of them are at least partly matters of Ubuntu community
organisation. We spend a lot of time on this, despite various policies
and practices aimed at minimizing them, because until recently the
Ubuntu division did not have anyone at all to coordinate the translation
effort. That's been partly addressed now, in the Intrepid cycle, but
the new role is still gearing up.
We do make improvements on the engineering side to help address these
problems: Ubuntu translations to language that have nobody to manage
them no longer solicit suggestions. We no longer need to take Launchpad
offline to initialize translations for a new release. A lot of outdated
or misleading UI text about translation teams has been cleaned up and
documentation has been rewritten. Also, as of next month, upstream
translations will start replacing ones that are translated only in
Launchpad but not upstream. (This would have rolled out last night, but
we were busy dealing with Ubuntu imports operationally).
Message-sharing will break down the walls between translations of
different Ubuntu releases, eliminating much duplication of effort and
taking a huge amount of pain out of translation openings, but it's a
major effort that we complete one step at a time.
Given the amount of pain it can cause, I think moving templates ahead of
translations as general practice is replacing one problem with another.
Our current plans are to open translations for new Ubuntu series much
more aggressively, building on the organisational changes being made on
the Ubuntu side; continue improving documentation thanks to the
unrelenting efforts of Matthew Revell; and continue with these technical
measures.
A more precisely outlined procedure might still help. For instance, we
might want to prioritize templates that have been Approved for a long
time but which don't have any translations in the queue. One limitation
there would be that the auto-approval process is already loading our
script server more heavily than we'd like. Or we might want to show
careful, this translation has an import coming warnings. The
limitations there would be UI design, page rendering cost, and
engineering time.
Jeroen
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