On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 06:51:26PM +0100, Isaac Clerencia wrote: > Rosetta is a tool to translate po files on-line, it's still in development and > it's non-free (closed source), so I would personally say *no*.
I agree, but for completely different reasons. A decision to use a specific translation tool should come from a translation team, not vendors hawking their systems. Rosetta is very nice, but they specifically use pot template versions that are tied to Ubuntu releases, which is putting the cart before the horse. Pootle is preferable in this respect, but still relies too much on a static template. In my experience with the Afrikaans translation, forking translations into parts that use an online tool and parts that use offline tools is a very bad idea. We were severely hampered by this, costing huge amounts of time to synchronize po files with the custom online tool, even though the online tool made it much easier to actually generate translations by reducing the barriers to entry for translators. The Hungarian translation (using offline po tools) was an absolute pleasure in comparison. Canonical does not seem to have ulterior motives with Rosetta, they claim no copyright on the translation, and claim to be planning to open source the system -- after all, the more languages Ubuntu is translated to, the better for them. Of course they would also like us to use their system so their translation wordlist gains a new set of domain specific words: then other fantasy games would be faster to translate in future. Overall I would recommend against using an online tool for translations unless it understands how to interoperate properly with the GNU po toolset. The online tools export to and import from po files, but seem all to want to be the primary data source and have a very static idea of what the translation template is, which I think is completely wrong. In actively evolving projects, the translation template changes all the time, and multiple different tools should all interoperate with the po file as the ultimate reference. The GNU toolset is pretty basic but still has some support for a dynamic template file, so using an online tool severely reduces one's ability to keep up with a changing template. Switching to online tools would probably be of most use to new translations and those that are below 30% complete, since it can help reduce the barrier to reaching critical mass. Ultimately, each translation team must decide for themselves. For comparison, the GNOME Translation Project has four languages on Pootle (Irish, Nahuatl, Spanish and Tibetan) and three on Rosetta (Georgian, Kurdish and Maori). The rest AFAICT are done using various offline po tools like KBabel, poedit, or emacs/vim packages (which all use the po file as the primary data source, and are built around the GNU tools). -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
