Hello,

This morning I discovered that the Transifex hosting site [1] had 
integrated Trac as a test project [2]. As it stands, this mainly gives 
us an overview of the work in progress.

I was told that there were some concerns about this, and questions about 
the implications this will have for our translation process. So let's 
discuss this openly here. The statistics themselves are a non-issue, as 
this is merely informative and should have no consequences, other than 
perhaps motivating the translators to update their translations, of 
course ;-)

The real question is if it would be a good idea to allow submissions 
from Transifex, what would be the pros and cons.

Personally, I think this would be a good thing, and my immediate 
reaction was to wonder why the submissions were not yet activated...  So 
I got in touch with Dimitris Glezos (Transifex's lead, who created that 
Trac test project ) to know a bit more about the options we have. The 
Transifex FAQ is also quite informative [3], as is their (Trac!) wiki [4].

So let me start the discussion with the following few points.

Most large projects are delegating direct write permissions in the 
repository to their translators; so far, no one has requested this for 
Trac, but I can see how this could be a good idea, as this would 
streamline the contribution process, and let translator have direct 
control over the translations they contribute. This doesn't mean that 
there couldn't be someone who takes care of the technical quality of the 
contributions, checks that the correct tools are used, etc. In that 
respect, Transifex used as a middle man would alleviate all the 
administrative burden, as only one account would have to be created. The 
technical details, whether we should get those contributions by e-mail 
or use an intermediate dvcs repository are also open. Anyway, having an 
official Trac mirror somewhere (be it a git or mercurial one, or both), 
would be a nice thing in any case. Hosting our own mirror would also be 
option, I imagine.

Transifex also has "Collections" of related projects (currently Django, 
GNOME and LXDE). I can imagine a "Trac" collection in this picture, as a 
way to collect all the translation projects for all the plugins, once 
people realize they can already translate their plugins ;-)

Editing translations directly on Transifex's site is probably not an 
option as of yet, due to the limitations of Lotte regarding the size of 
the catalogs, but as I understand it, this is going to change.

While the ideal for getting high quality translations remain in my 
opinion having people actually running Trac and testing their 
translations to see how well they work "in context", having the 
possibilities to get translations directly from a web interface doesn't 
sound bad either.

As I was writing this mail, I got a reply from Dimitris, telling me he 
handed down maintainership of the Trac project on transifex to me; Thanks!
I'll activate or not the submissions depending on the outcome of this 
discussion.

-- Christian

[1] - http://www.transifex.net
[2] - http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/trac/
[3] - http://www.transifex.net/faq/
[4] - http://transifex.org/



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