Re: Translating The GIMP

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Christian Rose <menthos@menthos.com> writes:

> > I have always asked people not to touch po files in CVS HEAD at all.
> > Until we change this rule, the po files are in the maintainers
> > responsibility.
> 
> I do not agree.
> Committing PO files to HEAD in any project is always risky business
> (large frequent changes im messages), and time for translating is always
> better spent in the stable branch, if there is one. HEAD is secondary at
> best, and translators should know what they are doing if they touch the
> HEAD branch. That I agree on.
> 
> But I think it's stupid to entirely forbid committing translations to
> the HEAD branch, if the translators know what they are doing. Why?
> Because of testing.

I didn't forbid it, I only tried to encourage people to concentrate on 
the stable branch. Now I want to weaken this policy since we are
approaching a developers release. I had the idea of helping translators
by bringing the translations in the unstable tree uptodate with the 
stable tree so they have something to start with. I think I am now 
convinced that I shouldn't do this. The problem is however that some 
of our translators don't have commit access and have been promised that 
their translations will be added to the unstable tree when the time has 
come. Well, the time has come, so what am I supposed to do?

> Translators know what charset is best suited for the locale, and works
> with the translation tools they use, developers don't.

well, I do know that we need UTF-8 encoded strings for GIMP since we
use GTK+-2.0. IMO the best solution is to enforce UTF-8 encoding for
our po files just like GTK+ does.

> > For the HEAD branch, we should try to find a responsible translation
> > maintainer for each language. The language maintainer should have CVS 
> > commit access and is responsible for coordinating his/her team of 
> > translators.
> 
> You've just described the GNOME Translation Project.

hmm, not all of our translators are part of the GNOME translation 
project and GIMP != GNOME. For that reason, I'd like to maintain a list
of language maintainers in the GIMP source tree. If the GNOME 
translation project wants to take this job and thinks such a list is a
waste of time, this is something we can and should consider, but it 
needs to be discussed. I really appreciate all the help I can get here
and don't feel comfortable maintaining GIMP translations, but at the
moment people send po updates to me. I'd prefer if this job could be
taken by someone else and if the GNOME translation project stands up
and wants the job, just tell me to whom I should send people with 
translation updates in the future. I would really love to be able to
concentrate on real hacking again.


Salut, Sven