Re: Announcing the Open Source Translation Database

[Andrew Smith <asmith16 littlesvr ca>]

Le 2012-03-14 06:39, Andre Klapper a écrit :
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 19:21 -0400, Andrew Smith wrote:
> > The OSTD ( http://littlesvr.ca/ostd/ ) is an automatic translations
> > system - it will take your .POT file and populate it with translations
> > based on strings in other open source software, generating .PO files.
>
> (Disclaimer: I haven't try it.)
> Questions that spontaneously come to my mind:
>
> Which "other open source software" is/are currently indexed?
I am trying to import translations from every piece of open source 
software out there. Right now I have 11 million strings from about 70% 
of the packages in Debian.

> Which licence(s) are the translated strings under?
> How do you make sure to avoid license violations (for example if I
> remember correctly, GFDL<=1.2 cannot be dual-licensed with Creative
> Commons)? Do you store each translated string in the database together
> with the license it was released under and ask which license the
> yet-to-populate .pot file will use?
I don't deal with licencing at all, knowing that all the strings I have 
are from open source software. I'm not very interested in getting bogged 
down in legal mumbo jumbo - I'm assuming that open source translators 
will be happy if their translations will be useful in more software and 
the kinds of projects who would use the service (like me) wouldn't be 
very concerned about it either, noone is going to sue them.

Still, this question keeps coming up and I don't have a good answer to 
it. I don't even know if single short-string translations can be 
copyrighted at all (or else does wordreference.com have copyright on all 
of English and French?), and how they are licenced if they are. Do you 
know what authority I could contact to ask about it? The OSI maybe? Or 
the FSF?

> > Given that you can see which software the strings come from - this will
> > be much more accurate than other automatic translation systems such as
> > Google Translate.
>
> Sounds like a remote Translation Memory, and reminds me of applications
> like "Virtaal" that can query services such as http://open-tran.eu/ or
> Google Translate to populate translations...
The OSTD is somewhat similar in concept but will produce far better 
results because all the string translations come from strings actually 
used in other software, and you can see which one(s).

Andrew