Re: BoF item 12/14: improvements to gtranslator

[Daniel Mustieles García <daniel mustieles gmail com>]

Sorry, but I disagree with you.

Gtranslator is a very powerful, easy and intuitive translation application. It's interface is simple, because it hasn't floating elements in the window, and it has separated boxes for original string, translated string and messages table.

Also, having several tools for the same purpose is not a bad thing; if we just had one tool for translating, and its maintainer decided to leave the project... what would we do? Use Lokalize? ;-)

Gtranslator has a really good plugins system, which allows to expand it easily. Instead of killing it, we should fight to create a development group to fix and improve it. Also, as I said at GUADEC, I think GT should be part of the GNOME desktop applications (since Anjuta is the official IDE, GT should be the official translation app). Maybe it would help to find someone to maintain it. 

GT is done, it's working, and a lot of people uses it. Why don't we try to fix it? It isn't completely broken; just 2 or 3 important bugs, but it works perfectly... are you sure you want to drop it? I don't agree and I'll keep myself trying to improve it, and looking for a maintainer. If we can't create or fix our own tools, what are we doing? I'm sure you'll agree with me it's stupid, por example, to develope GNOME Shell under .NET Framework isn't it? Is the same case with GNOME translations and Lokalize. Many people uses Lokalize to translate GNOME... WTF! GNOME is a big project, with a great Marketing and a really great i18n teams... aren't we able to find a developer and/or a maintainer to fix and improve our translation tool? I don't think so.

Instead of deprecating a working application, help us to fix and improve it. Please, don't let it die.

2012/9/10 Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 4:05 PM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As I said in previous mails, let this mail be a kickstart for giving
> feedback about the items that are defined on
> https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012
>
> In this mail please give feedback about the improvements on gtranslator
> item.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Gil Forcada

Quoting from:
https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012#Improvements_to_gtranslator

Improvements to gtranslator

Background:

A brainstorming session was run over which improvements will be nice
to have on gtranslator. Right now gtranslator is short on developers,
so having a bullet point in this list does not mean it will be
implemented in short or at all if the situation does not change.

Bullet points:

    open to review patches

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I guess my question would be "Why?".  Have you taken a good look at
Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit?  I personally think they are the
best thing since sliced bread when it comes to off-line L10n work.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/index
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/index

Instead of putting developer effort into gtranslate, put that effort
into converting Claude Paroz's Locale Helper web-app into a submission
workflow for glibc locales along the lines of CLDR's Survey Tool.

Or maybe work on enhancing the Translate Toolkit or Virtaal (if there
is something that you think they need).  Howwever; there is no need to
fall prey to the "not-invented-here" syndrome.  Perfectly good
solutions exist, under suitable licensing and with established
developer communities that it would be better to join rather than
re-code what they have already done.

Sure, the Translate Toolkit and Virtaal are not perfect.  No offense
intended to Friedel Wolff or the other superb translate.org devs but
as one example, I personally think POlogy does a better job of
producing differential PO files from two related input PO files (a
task I repeat occasionally), so the answer that makes sense to me is
to port the good things from other projects into TT and Virtaal to
make a really, really good product even better.  Reinventing the wheel
just seems like a waste of time.

Of course, I really like TT and Virtaal, maybe others have similarly
strong feelings about different tools like gtranslator or POedit. It
is never a waste of time defining important features and examining the
options to see what is best overall, but IMHO, I've settled on Virtaal
as the best-of-breed and would rather see work go into it than playing
catch up on gtranslator.  Choice is good, but I've made mine and I
would encourage others to try it before committing a lot of effort to
something else.

I have no intent to belittle the efforts of others, as I said, for
certain tasks I find that other tools work more intuitively or
efficiently, I just find that for me Virtaal has an overall advantage
as an off-line PO editor and that the TT allows me to do most of the
other manipulations of PO files I want to do.  YMMV.

cjl

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