Sending translation back

[Christian Rose]

tor 2005-06-16 klockan 09:33 +0100 skrev Mark Shuttleworth:
> Christian Rose wrote:
> 
> >It would have been even better news if more had been done in order to
> >improve interaction with upstreams that do *not* use Rosetta.
>
> We're getting pretty close to that. Shortly, we will be importing all of
> upstreams translations on a regular basis, so that other people won't
> unnecessarily duplicate the work of upstream. This will mean that
> distros can keep track of upstream even in cases where upstream is not
> working with Rosetta.
> 
> Sharing translations back with upstream at the moment is trivial:
> upstream can download, at any time, any pofiles from Rosetta that they
> want.

Well, from any upstream's situation, that is *not* trivial. Keeping
track of what all downstream's are doing/modifying/producing is a huge
amount of work, and applying the opposite workflow model isn't likely to
be in any way successful.


> We cannot commit pofiles directly into other projects CVS without
> permission, and we cannot just spam the project translators with rosetta
> po files, so making it all available for constant download strikes me as
> being a reasonable step. We can also do the work to enable
> subscriptions, so that an upstream only has to subscribe once and will
> then receive a regular mailing of any po files that they want.
> 
> It's very difficult to "improve interaction with people who do not want
> to talk to you by email, web or any other medium". If you have any
> suggestions as to other ways we could improve interaction with projects
> that are not using Rosetta, please let me know.

I believe much can be acheived right now simply by trying to make
Rosetta translators aware, with big notices on the pages, that for the
most part, their contributions will *not* automatically be contributed
upstream. That's the case at least now, and it's better to be honest
about it, instead of having contributed translations rotten away in
Rosetta and never ever be useful to anyone else than Ubuntu.

Perhaps this notice could then also be switched off for the projects
where you*do* know that synchronization with upstream is in place.

In a second step, some solution for automatically contributing back
translations to upstream can be acheived, e.g. by automatically sending
the Last-Translators the improved translations in Rosetta, or by sending
the upstream language team coordinators the completely new Rosetta
translations. If you provide a method for the recepient to acknowledge
that he or she wants these notices in the future, then you cannot be
accused for spamming. You've done your best, that's all.

Of course this needs some methods for extracting language team
coordinator information from upstream -- I'm sure we can figure
something out (e.g. an XML file format), at the very least in the case
of GNOME.


Don't get me wrong -- I beleive Rosetta is an unprecented and *very*
powerful tool. However, at the moment it is almost completely based on
the needs from a downstream distribution (aggregation/completion), and
doesn't help upstream much at all (the "contributing back" part), unless
the upstream projects are also going to use Rosetta, which isn't likely
to happen any time soon in many cases for a variety of reasons.

Given that, if Rosetta pretends to be the "be all end all" translation
project and attracts a lot of volunteers wanting to translate upstream
projects in Rosetta, unknowing of the fact that their contributions are
likely to stay trapped in Rosetta without ever getting upstream and used
by others unless they actively do something themselves, and that, as a
result, many contributions will be rotting away in Rosetta, then Rosetta
isn't helpful to the larger community at all.


Christian