Hi, Yesterday, I found myself wanting to correct a trivial markup error in the output of `lilypond --help`. To do that fix, I first have to register as a member of the translation team for French on the Translation Project, by contacting the team coordinator, and learn how to use the Translation Project Robot. This page doesn't sound very encouraging:
https://translationproject.org/html/translators.html Learning to use the robot While you are waiting for your disclaimer to be processed, you can already submit PO files to the robot, to practice. The robot may not accept the PO file, but it will probably discover some errors and tell you about them. People translating for the first time usually make various small mistakes and it may require a few tries before you get everything right, especially since the robot is very fussy about the contents of the header fields. Don't be discouraged, the robot is very patient. :-) Exactly how to deal with the robot is explained on translationproject.org/html/robot.html . The last update to translations in po/ was 00718f025f95b95c57e2eab653d7ccc299129377 in March 2021. Since then, Documentation/ has seen updates with 4 different translators in total, in Hugarian (3453e7f3c61c0fe9aa251829c52225ae5fd452ff and others by Dénes Harmath), Chinese (67a7a649d079f04222af989ba41cf9f3740646ab by Chengrui Li and 070ea5208663d17122bed24676a675e324304a8b by Guyutongxue), and French (numerous commits by Jean-Charles Malahieude), while the entry barrier for editing our complex Texinfo markup is much higher. I think this shows that the idea of the Translation Project as a hub for teams to work on several projects at the same time, making for more committed translators per project, is not working for us. It's awkward to have po files in the TP but not the documentation, as that just doubles the amount of contributing processes that a new translator has to learn. The PO template that is the basis for PO files needs to be updated at every release by notifying the coordinator of the release. That's a maintenance cost. Right now, we're not paying it, and the result is that the PO template any translators would base their work on is from LilyPond 2.21.7, a year and a half ago. In short: lots of fuss for not much reward, I think. I therefore propose that we simply disconnect from the TP and use our usual GitLab process to accept contributions to po/*.po. Thoughts? Best, Jean
