On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:08:32AM +0100, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
[...]
> At which interval are you posting the untranslated/to be updated
> po-files? Is there an arrangement in the french team how to avaoid
> duplicated work? Maybe something similar could be arranged for the
> german team (depending on the resonance on this list, of course).
Here are some guidelines we edicted on debian-l10n-french in order
to help coordination between translators. These are not the result
of some brainstorming, but we tried several ways and keep those
which gave good results. Note also that debian-l10n-french is
very active for years, so almost all French speaking person wanted
to help on l10n is told to join us. As your mailing list is
younger, there are surely many translators who are not aware of
your mailing list.
We consider that a translator is responsible for his translation.
This means that he is supposed to update it when needed, and there is
a NMU-like procedure when he is not responsive.
Our coordination is entirely based on the d-l-f mailing list. If you
look at archives, you will see that many messages have predefined tags,
their description is:
* [ITT] (Intent To Translate)
A translator first tells which document he wants to translate, and
if noone objects he can work on it.
* [DDR] (Demande de relecture = Document to be reviewed)
A translator sends his work to the list and asks for comments from
reviewers. They reply either privately or to the list.
If the initial translation did contain major errors, the translator
can run other rounds and send [DDR2], [DDR3] usw.
* [Relu] (Reviewed)
When a document has been reviewed by several people and the
translator believes that it is now in a pretty good shape, he
send the reviewed version to the list. Reviewers have then an
opportunity to make comments if they still disagree.
We are using these messages for all materials: wml files, PO files,
etc. If some people have CVS write access (as with webwml or the
debian-installer), files are directly committed when a [Relu] message
is sent, otherwise the translator has to file a bugreport.
The main problem is that there is no way to keep track of submitted
bugs, and when a translation is outdated we do not know whether
a translation is pending or if it has not yet been worked on.
For po-debconf files (not in the debian-installer) we relaxed the
rules above because these files were often small, and reviewers
often have few comments, mostly cosmetics. In these cases, the
translator files a bugreport and sends its number with the [Relu]
message. Christian Perrier manually gathers these bug numbers
and sends reports, as in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2003/debian-l10n-french-200312/msg00003.html
We have currently no better solution, but you may understand now why
some French translators are requesting a specific tag in the BTS to
sort out those bugreports ;)
With these reports and
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/fr
we have a pretty accurate status of our l10n work for po-debconf files.
Note also that Michel Grentzinger and Christian Perrier actively work
and file bugreports (with patches) to have debconf templates switched
to po-debconf, so they often anticipate and provide fr.po so that a
package is translated as soon as it appears on this page.
For the debian-installer this is a bit different, because
a. Debconf templates were moving very fast,
b. We have CVS write access
So it was pretty clear that working on released packages was not enough,
working directly on CVS files is much better. I then wrote scripts to
generate http://people.debian.org/~barbier/d-i/l10n/ pages.
Before the break-in these pages were updated every 4 hours, and
http://people.debian.org/~barbier/d-i/l10n/fr/STATUS.utf8.txt
was sent daily to d-l-f. This way, files are most of the time fixed
in few days and translators do not have to follow debian-boot or
subscribe to CVS log messages to know when templates files are modified.
As cron jobs are currently disabled on gluck, I have to log on gluck
and run a script manually. For now I did it once or twice a day, but
I hope that cron jobs will be back very soon.
Denis
PS: Please keep Cc'ing me I did not subscribe to d-l-g
