Comments on: A few reasons why Rosetta should not be considered as a translation platform for existing open source projects

By: Tomasz Zen Napierala

Tomasz Zen Napierala — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:59:32 +0000

Hi Og,
We had the same problems with polish translations. Now, as an official Ubuntu translation team, we are encouraging people to join upstream teams. We only use Rosetta for Ubuntu related, and independent projects. But still there are some people, that are translating in Rosetta once they discovered their favourite apps lacks translation. It’s a pitty that work couldn’t be synced.

By: Ben Asslestine

Ben Asslestine — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:34:56 +0000

I like translationproject.org. Some very popular softwares are translated this way. It’s simple and it works.

By: Danilo

Danilo — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 09:34:27 +0000

Rosetta support msgctxt feature of PO files since very early stages (i.e. soon after it was introduced in GNU gettext). Rosetta also fully supports translator comments.

KDE4 makes good use of that, but Rosetta was there first (of all the translation tools that I know of, except gettext itself): https://blueprints.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/rosetta-message-contexts (“Completed on 2007-08-23″, gettext 0.15 was released on 2006-07-21).

Rosetta even supports special KDE3 formatting for both plural forms and contexts in PO files and displays that nicely.

By: Benjamín Valero

Benjamín Valero — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:31:19 +0000

Og, my story is like yours, but in Spanish. I discovered that my translations for Ubuntu were almost all in vain. That’s why I decided to join to Gnome translators group, for example, so my work will be available in any distro, not just Ubuntu.

Of course, translations just for Ubuntu have meaning in strings used only in that distro, as the ones of the installer. This also happens in other distros.

By the way, I use Fedora since then, but this is just another story.

By: OgMaciel

OgMaciel — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:59:23 +0000

Hi Aaron, thank you for your feedback/reply. The feature you’ve mentioned about providing more context for translators is something that is being discussed in the GNOME community as well, and if I remember correctly it will be part of our workflow with he incorporation of the newer version of gettext. The thing is, afaik, Rosetta doesn’t expose this yet and a translator would only benefit from the feature if doing the translation using the PO file itself. Though I did translate a few KDE packages this year I may have picked modules that did not include context strings. It is great to know about this feature!

About the last part of your comment, or how I was publicly mistreated by Helio (and only him), everything is available in the mailing lists, though in Portuguese. My experience with *every* other member of the KDE community has been very pleasant to say the less, and you can only imagine my surprise when attacked out of the blue.

I will gladly send you a private email as soon as the holidays are over. Though this incident took place a while back and has not affected my desire or interest to contribute with the KDE translations effort, I’d very much like to see this type of behavior eliminated, specially from someone who is supposed to represent this project in the entire Latin America. I can only take your word about his true character but to me he has shown nothing less than arrogance and disrespect.

Cheers,

By: OgMaciel

OgMaciel — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:47:25 +0000

Hi Sebastian, thank you for your reply. As far as I know, registering a project in Launchpad does not synchronize the translations done via Rosetta back up the source code tree. There is a blueprint for it but you still have to manually download the translations from Rosetta (offered as individual or lump tarballs) and then apply those into the source code yourself. Transifex has an enormous advantage there…

“So the policy to allow suggestions by everybody is Ubuntu only.”

Right, and though my post may have deviated a bit from its original purpose, why Rosetta shouldn’t be used by upstream projects, I still think it is valid from the point that Ubuntu’s policy is flawed for not doing the right thing.

Your last comments are absolutely correct and part of my blueprint (mentioned in the post) is dedicated to trying to improve this area.

Cheers,

By: rawsausage

rawsausage — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:54:15 +0000

The real problem is the translating itself. It shouldn’t be done.

By: Sebastian Heinlein

Sebastian Heinlein — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 09:30:35 +0000

Hello,

you are mixing to different issues: Ubuntu and Launchpad Translations (Rosetta). Ubuntu is “just” a project using Launchpad Translations. So the policy to allow suggestions by everybody is Ubuntu only.

You should not translate your project through Ubuntu, but register a separate upstream project in Launchpad.

So the arguments of suggestion policy and upstream cooperation are not really ones.

I could show you a lot of errors done by translators using traditional tools and not taking the context into account. This has to be handled by a review process as in every other team/platform too.

By: Adi Roiban

Adi Roiban — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:54:25 +0000

Hi Og and thanks for posting your thoughts.

I think you made a huge fundamental confusion in this post.
There is a big difference between an free/open source application and a free/open source distribution. Both are flos project but only a distribution needs to deal with upstream problems.

Is an open source project, other than a distribution is hosted in Launchpad and will use Launchpad Translations it will not have to deal with the upstream problems (as Launchpad is the upstream source).

From my point of view your whole post is about translating a distribution in Rosetta, but this is not stated clearly,

I know the upstream projects are bitching about Ubuntu Translations teams, but all this work is available to everyone under a bsd licence and every upstream project have access to the work of Ubuntu translators and integrate the changes upstream.

By: Aaron Seigo

Aaron Seigo — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:23:40 +0000

KDE upstream has been hearing all these exact same things for a while now. Having talked with Jono a bit about it, I do know they are aware of the issues. Hopefully they can do something about it for the sake of their users.

At this point, simply using upstream translations for many projects would be a much better solution.

Anyways …

“Since the context here is a board game with a little mouse”

we solved that in KDE4 with the concept of context, so you can do this in the code: i18nc(“The pointing device”, “Mouse”) and the translator will see “The pointing device” as context when translating, and if “Mouse” appears twice in the code it is disambiguated using the context. lots of clever i18n stuff in kde4 (including the ability use javascript to translate at runtime really bizarre things).

“I was even called names by the Brazilian KDE / Latin America representative”

I assume you mean Helio? Please feel free to email me privately with what happened so that we can do an internal debriefing and try and make sure such bad feelings are stirred in the future. We (KDE) try to be good community members, though sometimes individuals need some support in doing so.

That said, I hope whatever happened actually was worth calling him an “asshole” publicly on your blog. I know Helio personally and he’s certainly Brazillian, but not an asshole, in my experience.