Re: Complaint of the Slovak coordinator

[Laco Gubík <lacogubik googlemail com>]

Hi,

Like I mentioned in my previous email, I just want to clarify some
misleading statements in Marcel's answers.

On 13 May 2010 11:05, Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 09:30:01PM +0200, Peter Mraz wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I have been advised to write an email to this mailing list to help us
>> resolve the problems of the Slovak translation team.
>>
>>
>> Due to reasons listed below our team is unhappy with approach and behaviour
>> of current coordinator of team. Recently, I have volunteered for new
>> coordinator by sending email to gnome-sk-list outlining how I would like to
>> change the way team works [8]. I have also asked members of our team to
>> express their opinion on whether they would like to change coordinator.
>> Throughout past three weeks 6 members of our team have voted for myself and
>> 3 members have voted against the change of coordinator (more less all active
>> members of team have voted and expressed their opinions). Marcel has
>> discussed this with me in quite a length, however he did not decided to
>> accept wish of majority of the team and resign.
>
>
> The Slovak Translation team have 16 members now. Three of them are with
> team for long time (more than one year): Paľo, Pavol and me. Other 13
> members joined the team in last year (approx.) - since March 2009.
>
> These 13 members are either somehow active (9: Marián, Miroslav, Laco,
> Robert, Ivan, Roman, Peter, Jaroslav, Tomáš V) or not active (4: Jozef,
> Ján, Martin, Tomáš Z). Not active means that they did not submitted any
> translation since the join and their mail activity is very low too.
>
> All members who "voted" for the coordinator change are with team for
> less than a year, in many cases less than a half of year. All "old"
> members are against the change.
Not true, helix84 is with team longer, at least from 2007. It also
does not mean that all the "new members" were new to translating when
they joined Slovak Gnome Team. Some of us were active translators
before joining Slovak team and have participated in various projects
translating applications and documentation and seen much better
performing teams.
The fact that some members voted against Peter does not mean they are
completely happy with Marcel's approach either, they have also
expressed dissatisfaction with some aspects of his leadership.

>
> Most of the members who "voted" for a change sent their "vote" right
> after the Peter's proposal.
>
> After the Peter's proposal I started to discuss his ideas and we found
> that these proposals fits to several categories:
> - just do it. You do not need to be the coordinator to have these done
>  (for example, to write some wiki articles)
Just do it, but if coordinator argues with you in thread long several
emails and does not see reason why your article should be added to the
wiki, because this information already exists on Internet in English,
you kind of lose interest and motivation to do anything like this.
It is beyond my comprehension why coordinator would be so against
other people trying something different and why he needs to be so
dismotivational.

> - no change. After the detail explanation we found that the real change
>  would be none or insignificant.
Change would be significant - checked modules committed in some
specified time, trust to the team, new members welcomed, if this is
nothing for Marcel...

> - unclear change with potentially more overhead. For example the change
>  with module assignments.
Clear enough for me and some other guys who have reviewed and were
happy with this proposal. Peter has shown repeatedly in the past that
he has lot of time, more than anybody else in team including Marcel.
Therefore i do not see this as issue, plus i do not think this would
be so much of overhead.

> - change with potential impact on quality. For example time limits for
>  reviewers to do their job.
Yeap quality might sligltly decrease, but instead of current 98-99%,
I'm quite sure that it will not get worse than 95%. But we will cover
much more, and any error might always be fixed afterwards.

> - something else (maybe I forgot something that does not fit to any of
>  the above categories)
>
> As I said above, most of the "for change votes" came before the
> discussion and maybe some voters changed thier mind (but nobody
> expressed it, so I am not sure, we can ask).
>
> Peter finished the discussion with this sentence (rough translation):
> I'll do all possible steps for the coordinator change.
>
> I feel this Peter's campaign is more personal than technical.
I mentioned in my previous email that this is nothing personal for
Peter, he is not trying to be coordinator for any price. He only
agreed to offer himself as new coordinator after other members of team
asked him and show their support.
>
>>
>> Therefore I would like to ask you to help us resolve this situation, as
>> current coordinator does not want to give up his position. Please see our
>> reasoning below.
>>
>> (I do acknowledge that most of the references provided here are in Slovak,
>> however at least members of Czech team should be able to understand them and
>> verify if necessary).
>>
>>
>> We observe the declining trend in the amount of Gnome translated to Slovak:
>>
>> Gnome 2.20 – 70%
>>
>> Gnome 2.22 – 59%
>>
>> Gnome 2.24 – 56%
>>
>> Gnome 2.26 – 52%
>>
>> Gnome 2.28 – 48%
>>
>> Gnome 2.30 - 46%
>
> The above is true. During that period (for long time till beginning of
> 2009) the tam had 3 regular members with occasional help from some other
> people. They often just sent a translation (sometimes bypassing the
> team) and never returned back for the module translation maintenance or
> updates. In that time the quality and quantity suffered. The quality
> suffered because most of the translations and updates were not reviewed
> by someone else.
Here I would like to ask question why only 3 people were in team, were
Marcel enough welcoming and approachful to the new starters? Was he
getting most out of his team?
>
> When Claude and his team (big thanks!) integrated the Vertimus to the
> Damned Lies we had a chance to formalize a bit the translation process
> by leveraging the Vertimus. So we started to do the translation reviews
> using Vertimus workflow.
>
>> This happens while there is a quite active team and currently there are 25
>> modules to be committed and most of them are in this state from Feb/Mar.
>> (I'm convinced that there would even more activity if things would be moving
>> quicker).
>
> Yes. That's true. Because most of the team members are new to the team
> we need to carefully reviewer their translations before commit to make
> sure the translations are correct and consistent. Most of these
> translations comes from members who joined the team about Christmas
> 2009. 4 active members joined the team between November 2009 and
> Februrary 2010. There are also some other inactive members joined during
> that period, but I do not count them. So this generated somehow bigger
> load of new translations in our queue.
Like I have mentioned above, not all new members were inexperienced.
On top of that, about 50% of modules committed in past year were
translated by Marcel and 25% by Pavol Simo (older "member"), so only 6
or 7 modules in past year were committed, which were translated by
somebody else including new members. This does not give too much
chance to new members, does it?

>
> To have this achieved I upgraded the status of all team members, who
> asked for that, to reviewers. We now have 4 reviewers. But as I said
> above, most of them are newcomers and/or their konwledge of either
> English, or Slovak, or GNOME internals,... is not well enough, so I
> decided to finally check all of the already reviewed translations. In
> most cases I found important mistakes, so this workflow proved to be
> better than just commit the already reviewed translation with suffering
> quality.
All of us make mistakes, even more experienced and if one does not
trust people it will never work.

>
> Because of this situation: a lot of new translations with not enough
> quality after the review we have the bottleneck where many translations
> are waiting for my review. To be honest, this is understandable. When
> you have about 6 active translations with 4 reviewers the rate of new
> translations income for my final review is really huge.
Lot of team members have repeatedly asked Marcel to provide
dictionary, and some of them even started discussing different
possible implementations, but Marcel showed little interest and only
said that he is busy right now but wants to do it in future.
It is hard to do translation when you are not sure which of the
correct possible translations you should use.
I personally, from what I have seen, do not think that all these
translations were so bad. There is difference between bad translation
and not a perfect translation and also other people might use slightly
different  style or synonyms, which does not make their translation
necessarily bad.
>
> I asked team members several times for patience with explanation that
> when the current translations and reviewers will be more skilled my
> "final review" role will be eliminated. I believe some of them are able
> to understand that.
>
>>
>>
>> I see the problem in that the coordinator of the Slovak team, Marcel,
>> focuses solely on perfection and nothing else. While I understand that
>> quality is important, the translation procedure should be organized in such
>> a way that strive for quality is not the factor which decreases the coverage
>> of the translated Gnome. On his side there is no will for any compromise,
>
> The current model used in our team have a big potential to rise up
> translation percentage significantly for GNOME 3.0.
I disagree here because currently there is about same amount of
modules waiting to be committed and therefore checked by Marcel, as he
committed in past year (and bear in mind that lot of these are
completly new translation not just updates to existing). Marcel has
said in Feb/Mar when he committed maybe third of all modules, that he
was giving all his spare time to this and not even spending enough
time with his family. We all know that this is not feasible from long
term point of view and therefore I think that the rate of commits by
Marcel will probably not increase. Hence we struggle to see the big
potential in this model.

>
>> even though majority of the team voted for change on this[1] and would like
>> to see more translations being committed. He has very little or no wish to
>> try to get more modules translated, unless they are 100% perfect. He has
>
> Not true. "100% perfect" is just simply not true.
>
>> recently said that he had not ignored the wish of the majority of the team,
>> but he had not accepted it, providing only this explanation: "What you wish
>> for is nice, however wishes might not always come true, even if the majority
>> wishes it." [2].
>> In past year he committed 26 modules (some of them more than once), half of
>> these modules were modules translated by him. Between June 2009 and February
>> 2010 he committed only 2 modules (24.9.2009 damned-lies, 10.11.2009
>> swfdec-gnome). Two-thirds of commits were done since February 2010, after a
>> proposal to change the coordinator and after a lot of members asked for a
>> change in the work flow.
>> Marcel checks everything after each reviewer and until he checks it whole
>> (including string which are currently translated) and all of his comments
>> are addressed he does not commit the module.
>
> Because of the quality. As I explained several times.
>
>>
>> He also insists on numerous bureaucratic procedures which are not necessary:
>>
>>    -
>>
>>    Every new member must sent a registration email with very strict
>>    formatting rules, and unless he/she does it, he/she is not accepted to the
>
> When we found that to sent a mail where a template can be easily
> copy'n'pasted from http://live.gnome.org/SlovakTranslation/NewMember is
> the problem, one member of the team voluntered to create a web application
> where a new member can easily fill all information and the web app will
> sent an email on behalf of him.
Main issue is not that there is need to send an email, but fact that
Marcel will refuse new member only because he had in his email extra
linebrake, or written something in capitals. This is problem, not a
sending of email, nobody has anything against new joiners email.

>
>>    Slovak team. Even if one provides all information required and he/she
>>    fulfills all the prerequisites, he/she would not be accepted as a team
>>    member, if the registration email has an extra line, or a line is broken by
>>    an email client etc. This causes issues with almost every new member trying
>>    to join the team. Marcel considers this as some kind of test! (The only
>>    explanation why the email must be in this format was that Marcel wrote a
>>    script to check whether the registration email is correctly formatted and
>>    another script to get some statistics on team performance).
>>    -
>>
>>    Until recently, Marcel insisted on using only one's full name, as it is
>>    written in the birth certificate !! After a long discussions [9] at
>
> Nobody never checked the name against any paper, even birth certificate
> or something else.
This was big issue for Marcel also when I wanted to join team, he did
not want to see my birth certificate, but refused to register me in
team based on fact that form of name which I wanted to use is not an
official. It took few weeks and numerous emails until he finaly
accepted me.
He still does not allow people to use nicknames. Which I do not think
he has right to do.

>
> When I developed the registration system I had no feeling that anybody
> would complain about real name. In that time all team members used the
> real name.
>
>>    gnome-sk-list, he has allowed members to use other forms of one's name (e.g.
>>    Joe if your full name is John), however one still cannot use his/her
>>    nickname!! [10] (It was even pointed to in the mailing list that this is
>>    against a Slovak law which gives the right to use any name or nickname to
>>    publish one's work).
>
> This is not against the Slovak law. Maybe it is against the Peter's
> interpretation of the law. IANAL. AFAIK, Peter is not lawyer too.
>
>>    -
>>
>>    Marcel also does not accept translations of modules unless one promises
>>    to look after the module in the future. There was a case of somebody out of
>>    the team submitting translation of dia, and Marcel refused to include it
>>    unless that person would join the team and would look after the module.
>
> These one time translators are big problem for quality. You cannot
> achieve quality with random translators.
Nothing prevents you to accept this and check it, or offer it to
somebody else to check it. In worst case you can still add it into
Vertimus and not commit it, somebody would eventualy pick it up and
finish it.

>
>>    -
>>
>>    Recently, Marcel proposed a new system to accept and change rules
>>    governing Slovak Gnome translation team. His first draft of the procedures
>>    can be found here [3]. It is extremely lengthy and written in obscure
>>    language and the chance is that nobody will be willing to read it at all.
>
> The proposal is just a draft now. When there is an idea how to improve
> it, I always incorporate the idea into the document.
>
> There are several team members who read it and accepted it (some of them
> had good suggestions for improvements). There are some other members who
> denied to read it because it is just long (according to their feeling).
> Peter is one such member.
>
> It looks like when I came with something new to the team, the idea is
> denied by default by Peter. This supports my feeling that his fight is
> more personal than technical.
Again not true. Whoever disagree with somebody must be fighting
against him? I do not think so.

>
>>    -
>>
>>    He refuses to allow anybody else except for him to commit translations
>>    without specifying sane reasons. The only given reason was "the time has not
>>    come yet" and also "there will be transparent rules created when I will get
>>    more time, which is not now"[4]. No rules were published up till now.
>
> This can be considered as example of Peter's anti-bureaucracy agenda:
> Please create new rules. :-)
Again misleading. Marcel has originally said that he will create these
rules, nobody asked for them, we only asked for one more committer.

>
> OTOH, Peter suggested some rules for new commiter: A reviewer who
> translated at least 5 modules with more than 100 messages each.
Peter has based this on requirements of GTP for new account:
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/RequestingAnAccount

Regards

Laco

>
> Also, here are Peter's "rules" for the new reviewer:
> - basic knowledge about work with po files (writing comments, marking
>  fuzzy)
> - be able to file a bug into bugzilla
> - to compile a module from git
>
>>
>>
>> Marcel by himself decides who should translate which module and refuses to
>> give up modules which he has assigned to himself in the past, even though he
>> has not worked on them for a long time. Here, [5], [6], are few examples
>> from recent past where Marcel refused to allow other members of the team to
>
> There are still many free modules. So if somebody wants to translate,
> there is option to select something valuable. As I explained in our team
> mailing list, when my untouched modules will be the real stoppers for
> complate GNOME translation I'll transfer them to some other translators.
>
>> translate module, but he did not updated them by himself. If one wants to
>> start translating a module, he/she must first request it by an email and
>> only when he checks that it is not one of the modules he would like to
>> translate in the future by himself, he then assigns it to translator.
>
> The main purpuse for this is not "he checks that it is not one of the
> modules he would like". The assignmet is just about to avoid conflicts,
> to not assign too hard modules for newcomers, etc. Yes, sometimes the
> request reveals that there is some old my mudule I have not placed to
> the assignment table, but now it is rare.
>
> The response time for such "request for assign" is less than one working
> day, so no big deal, I hope, for translators.
>
>>
>> It should also be noted that the few improvements, which happened in the
>> past months, happened only after lengthy discussions, a proposal to change
>> the coordinator and pressure from other members of the team. There already
>> were problems with that in the past, and he only started replying once there
>> was discussion about his replacement [7].
>>
>> Further, I know two former members of the Slovak team who had quit because
>> of the behavior of the coordinator.
>>
>>
>> I hope that you will be able to help us to resolve this.
>>
>
> Sorry for making this loundry public. I wanted to avoid that but
> apparently some members of our team are fighting against me. Personally.
>
> I expressed some direct answers to Peter's sentences above. I did not
> went into deeper details and for now because I hope it is not required
> to do so. If a better explanation is needed, please let me know, but I
> do not will to open other cans of worms and fight against Peter or few
> other team members.
>
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> +-------------------------------------------+
> | Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel telka sk  |
> |                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
> |                jabber:   marcel jabber sk |
> +-------------------------------------------+
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