Le 2025-03-18 18:19, Marc Haber a écrit :
In a few cases there is spurious "fuzzing", e.g. when the source
message uses `...' for quoting where it shoud have been using \"...\".
In some of these cases it may be possible to fix the issue in the
source message, but I believe other cases are actually bugs in
msgmerge. Are these what your translators are asking you to deal with?
Not directly the translators, but many years ago somebody who helped me
with making a package fit for translation mentioned that such changes
are unfriendly to translators and that one should handle those manually
and unfuzz things (in a manual process that seemed clumsy and
error-prone to me even back then).
It's hard to tell if this advice is still relevant without more details,
but IMO expecting the maintainers to unfuzz translations themselves is
not a sound workflow, especially if that has to be done manually.
On a merge request I would just post comments to ask the translator to
fix the headers metadata and licensing, but may still deal with
normalizing/rewrapping myself (e.g. by adding a commit to the MR where
possible). If this were exchanged over e-mail I would probably fix
most trivial things myself.
So you're saying that as package maintainer I can freely edit headers
and metadata for translations, putting the PO file into a mixed domain
between package maintainer and the respective translator?
Yes. They hand you the manuscript but you are the editor and printer.
Header and metadata changes where the translator is not expected to have
any reason to disagree with your changes are fine. You may also tell the
translator that you are going to do these changes and give them a few
days to react, to be nicer.
³ I have received translations that were obviously done against the
POT
file from stable.
That's a start, I guess. Maybe in these cases you can keep the .po
file as submitted for proposed updates, merge it in unstable and
nicely ask the translator to also please work on the upcoming version.
But translating a stable package does show a blatant non-understanding
of Debian's development mechanisms! How am I supposed to trust people
who care THIS little about the project they're contributing to?
It's not necessarily that they care little, more probably they don't
have enough experience with software development or even engineering in
general and don't realize the extent of established processes that could
be in place, so they don't even search for them, or if they do they
don't know what to look for and where.
There is actually a fairly elaborate translation workflow, apparently
followed by most translation teams but AFAICT only fully documented here
[1] (that is, in french) and more specifically here [2] for Debian
native software. Don't take it personally: as an established maintainer
of i18nized software did you know about this process? Is there a page in
english or in translator's language you could refer them to so you could
kindly ask them to have their work reviewed and proofread as part of the
process (as you can't yourself check that there isn't, for example,
inappropriate language in the submitted translation), even though they
missed the initial steps?
Cheers,
[1]: https://www.debian.org/international/french/
[2]: https://www.debian.org/international/french/po
--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
