On 09/11/2006, at 9:21 AM, Francisco Javier F. Serrador wrote:
Well, I think we are reusing some libs of translate-toolkit (which is part of pootle). I know about Debian and Pootle experiment, but I have some concerns about lowering barriers and not lowering quality at the same time. Lowering technological barriers is good, you get more people involved, but the QA group can be overhelmed by hundreds of low quality translations easily.
One of the reasons I use Pootle, is my concern for access-control and quality-control.
For example, I used Pootle recently for our translation of OpenOffice 2.1 (soon to be released for the first time in Vietnamese!). As admin of the team, I assigned access rights and goals. Both can be as detailed as you require.
Anyone can register with Pootle, but they can't touch your project until you assign them rights. So they email you, and you interview them the same way you would any translator, and arrange to see their work, review it, mentor them etc.
Pootle actually makes that process easier, with its "suggestion" feature. You can assign newer translators only the right to "suggest" translations. They can logon at any time and make suggestions (they hit the "Suggest" button instead of "Submit" when they enter a translation), and when you logon, you can go through the suggesions at your leisure. Each one is clearly marked with the name of the translator who suggested it. No suggestion will be part of the translation file unless you decide to accept it.
Pootle makes it so much easier for people to contribute, but it also ensures you have the right to choose who will contribute, and how they will do so. You decide how many people you want involved. You can't be overwhelmed by translations, because only the people you assign can participate.
Everything they do is there for you to review and assess. The distributed nature of Pootle takes a lot of the load out of coordinating the work, because everyone has immediate and shared access to the current file(s). Pootle's roadmap even includes the capacity (possibly by Jabber) to communicate with your team via the interface, either live with the people currently online, or by leaving messages for those who haven't logged on yet.
Pootle is designed as a project tool, not a separate project of any kind. It's one option in your toolkit, and aimed directly at the upstream project involved. You can customize it to suit your project. SVN sync, for example, is now available for project files.
For my OOo project, I needed to upload the great mass of OOo files, convert from the OOo format to PO, update from the various OOo "milestones" during the translation process, run all the OOo-specific checks, and convert all the PO files in their tortuous hierarchy back into one .sdf file of the appropriate format. Pootle did all that for me.
Don't confuse Pootle with Rosetta. Pootle is free software. It has always had strict access-control and quality-control. It's designed to fit into our workflow, and respond to our needs.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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