Re: Translating recipes

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 5:57 AM, Daniel Mustieles García <daniel mustieles gmail com> wrote:

- Translating such recipes will now require you to translate from your language to

  another (most likely, to English).

So, if I've understood well, is the translator who has to convert the original text of the recipe into both English and his/her language? If so, here I see two problems:
 

  - Translating from Spanish/translator's language into English: might be difficult because of names of ingredients, recipe's steps (each user might use their own cooking language which not always will have a comprehensive translation into English)

  - Traslating from an unknown language (for example, Polish): should I wait Polish translators to translate the recipe into Enslish to be able to translate it into Spanish?

Also note that tons of contributions will require tons of hours to translate those recipes... maybe translators won't be able to afford such task and recipes will be left in english (or other language), which is not desirable to expand the use of this great app.

Please let me know if I've misunderstood the new flow you're proposing. Maybe it's easier than what I've thought.

Let me try to explain the situation better, and outline what options we have to deal with it:

GNOME recipes is about sharing recipes, and we want to avoid the English language requirement being a hurdle to contribution.

So, we expect that going forward, we will get recipe contributions in languages other than English, and we want to start accepting

them. In fact, during the week here in Jogjakarta, Elvin reached out to local cooking students and managed to collect more than

20 Indonesian recipes!h

There are a few options we have for dealing with this content:

1) We can introduce the concept of 'recipe packs', eg an 'Indonesian recipes' pack that could be installed separately. This would

come with the understanding that recipes in that pack will only be available in the local language. In this case, there is less of a

need to translate the recipes. But it would still be nice to have a native speaker do some quality control on the content, ie check

punctuation, spelling, etc.

2) We can just add these recipes to our main pool of recipes as-is. Again, we probably want quality control, even if we don't

require translation. In this case, we probably want to tag recipes with their language, and add some language filtering capabilities

in the applications, so users can control the languages they see. This may ultimatively take the form of a desktop-wide 'content
language' setting (acutally, it may have to be a preference-ordered list).

3) We can ask you to translate the recipes to English first and only add the English translation to the main pool of recipes (with

the understanding that it would then be translated to other languages like other recipes in the pool). This may be a bit problematic,

since translating recipes is hard, and we've just shifted that burden from the contributors to the translators. And translating a

recipe twice sounds like a recipe (!) for information loss.

4) Some combination above.

Hope this clarifies