Re: Translating schema files (was: Re: Survey results (yay!))

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> El dl 01 de 11 de 2010 a les 00:21 +0200, en/na Simos Xenitellis va
> escriure:
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 11:25 PM, jbowtie amathaine com
>> <jbowtie amathaine com> wrote:
>>         Speaking as a small team coordinator struggling to recruit
>>         people and
>>         get them active, I have to agree this is a big issue - I don't
>>         know
>>         how we'll ever make it to 20%, much less 80%. The problem is
>>         that most
>>         people take one look at a file filled with error messages and
>>         schema
>>         strings and I never hear from them again. I *only* get
>>         contributions
>>         when I can tell them *exactly* which strings in the file
>>         correspond to
>>         buttons/menus/labels.  Guess what?  I can't do that on my own
>>         for most
>>         modules, which is why over the last few years our stats have
>>         actually
>>         dropped from nearly 5% to <1%. In fact, I don't think I've
>>         landed a
>>         single contribution since the switch to Git (though there have
>>         a been
>>         a few drive-by translations via Ubuntu).
>>
>>         I don't know how many of the other languages languishing at
>>         the bottom
>>         of the list are facing the same issue, but I'll bet it's a
>>         fair
>>         number. I can swear to you that if I could get a fair number
>>         of the UI
>>         elements translated (say, 20% by D-L stats), we would see a
>>         big surge
>>         in contributions and maybe even sponsorship from the Language
>>         Commission.
>>
>>         I mean, gtk+ is my favorite example here; the first string is
>>         "Error
>>         parsing option --gdk-debug", while the stock labels (which is
>>         frankly
>>         all I care about given our general lack of coverage) are down
>>         somewhere around 450 strings in. 99% of my users are never
>>         going to
>>         see any of the command-line stuff in the gtk+ module, but 100%
>>         of them
>>         are going to encounter the stock labels. Why should I *have*
>>         to
>>         explain all this stuff to every potential recruit? It's hard
>>         enough
>>         just finding people who are willing to contribute in the first
>>         place;
>>         then the first thing they see is the sea of technical messages
>>         and
>>         their motivation just evaporates.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks for describing this eloquently.
>>
>>
>> Of course, fully translated GNOME means all files translated, but it's
>> nice to have this intermediate goal where you translate the most
>> visible strings.
>>
>> My suggestion would be to have a parallel page (let's call it
>> "Compact"), similar to your
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/el/gnome-3-0/ui/
>> which would show the reduced PO files, after the filtering to remove
>> schema/error/etc strings.
>> This filtering would take place only in damned-lies.
>>
>> What damned-lies would do for each PO file that appears in the Compact
>> page of statistics,
>> 1. For each message in the PO file
>> 2.    If the message is already translated or fuzzy, add it anyway to
>> the Compact PO file
>> 3.    If the message is not important (schema, CLI error message,
>> etc), ignore it
>> 4.    Add the remaining messages to the Compact PO file
>>
>> Due to this, it would be fine to commit these reduced PO files, and
>> you would not lose data.
>>
>> What would the translators do,
>> 1. If you are a new team (few translations), do translations on the
>> Compact page at damned-lies, until you complete them all fully. Once
>> you achieved the first translation goal, go to the regular page for
>> your language to continue the full translations, schemas, error
>> messages and so on.
>> 2. If you are an experienced team with good level of translations,
>> ignore the Compact page and translate as you always have been doing.
>>
>> I would call this special page,
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/el/gnome-3-0/compactui/
>> (note the 'compactui').
>>
>> There is the issue of having both
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/el/gnome-3-0/ui/
>> and
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/el/gnome-3-0/compactui/
>> at the same time.
>> It would be ideal if the team coordinator for each language could set
>> in the Preferences for their language to show either one or the other
>> page for the UI translations. That is, you go to
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/LL for your language and it shows by
>> default either the full UI translations URL or the Compact URL.
>
>
> Nice approach!
>
> Splitting translations as in schemas and others can be quite easy. The
> more problematic ones are the splitting the errors, would make sense to
> add a keyword on msgctxt (i.e. "ERROR: the actual context text")? That
> way we could manually fix the files ourselves.
>
> Cheers,
>
>> Simos

There's no automatic way to split errors from the GUI strings, so
it'll be a huge amount of work for programmers (and require sustained
maintenance work), while the benefit to translators is not significant
IMHO.  But I'd really like to see all the useless schema strings
separated out.

Regards
Ask