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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @04:49
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Contributing is still as easy as it was 3 years ago, and a lot easier then it was 5 years ago. (5 years ago, you had to use an editor, like kwrite or nedit, nowadays you can use special po-editors, webbased interfaces, translation memories, etc. etc...)
The difference between the years is that the amount of strings that need to be translated is a lot larger.
Statistics don't tell the whole story about the status of a translation team. Some teams decide not to translate all available software in cvs, but to maintain only thos apps that make sense to them. Statisticly those teams came to a standstil, while in reality they are continuing improving their current translations..
Also, looking in 'stable' does not give you the correct picture. For example, the Dutch team is translating the docs in 'trunk', not in 'stable'. And now that extragear can use branches, third party applications will probably appear in the 'stable' stats of i18n.kde.org. Not every team is translating third party apps, so the stats will go down...
Besides, whatever infrastructure we will use, translating documentation and applications will always mean that you have to translate the English strings, and that is a very time consuming task...
What the translation teams need is people who are willing to spent some of their precious time translating the gui and docs to their language..
Rinse
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @13:00
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What the wiki way showed us was: lower entrance barriers and the project will lift up. Wikipedia reached what the closed open contribution project Nupedia failed to reach. Translation is an easy task but it is not made easy.
- you have to contact the project and get involved
- you have to know what po and pot files are
- you have to get the right files.
- you need knowledge of KDE internals, SVN
Webbased tools for translations are of course a great contribution but currently third party.
There are today much more KDE users than 3 years ago. The translation infrastructure does not scale. It does not attract contributors. Community plattforms such as KDe-look or KDE-apps were also a great example what can be achieved whwn you lower entrance barriers.
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Re: Translation
by ac on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @14:17
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"The translation infrastructure does not scale."
While everything else you wrote is fine and dandy (and mostly bogus in KDE's case unless you are the first translator of your mother language) what's your proof for the above statement?
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @18:10
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It does not scale means: A lot of new apps are added but the "low involvement" task translation does not adapt in a fast way. Even major KDE languages such as German are not 100% done in the stable branch. Note that there are many KDe users in Germany.
I know that some review is needed. But contributing is currently not an average joe task. Translations have still a serious lack. While programming and development in general becomes easiert the translation infrastructure was frozen in say 2002, regarded as good enough. i don't think it is.
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @00:39
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Looking at the German stats, Except for kio_svn.po and some strings in spy.po their translation of the official KDE-modules is completed.
kio_svn.po was added after the release of kde 3.4.1 (afaik), so it's no wonder that one is untranslated. The german team has until july 17 to translate it :)
Looking at the stats of the german koffice, You will notice that krita, kplato and kivio are unfinished.
Both krita and kivio contain a lot of strings that need more than average knowledge of the subject to translate.
In those cases, the fact that they are po-files is not the barrier, but being familiar with the typ of application is.
I don't see how a wiki or other webbased solution can solve that.
One of the major issues that a wiki does not solve either is the quality of the translation in order of consistency with other parts of KDE. One can translate the hundreds of different colors in krita, or the hundreds of different stencils kivio by sucking them out of you thumb, but that would end up with a shamefull translation rather then a usefull translation.
Looking back at the Dutch translation of Krita, most of the color strings are left untranslated. But you won't see that in the stats, because we copied/pasted the English phrase to the translation. If the German team also decides not to translate the named colors, but does not copy them to the translation fields, then their stats would put them behind the Dutch team, while in real life they are not. (like i said earlier, stats don't tell the whole story)
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @08:33
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Forget about the stats. It is about the fact that in the current translation model translation is not the easy taks it is supposed to be.
And documentation is really worse than GUI. The team does not scale. The question is: how long will it last to translate 100%, is the change and new string expansion faster than what a translation team contributes.
We don't want a translation lag.
I understand pretty well that translation is not that easy, that it requires high skills.
It is more a recruitment issue. Open models are always superiour.
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @21:11
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> It is about the fact that in the current translation model translation is not the easy taks it is supposed to be.
But why isn't it?
You don't come up with any reason of why the current model fails...
>I understand pretty well that translation is not that easy, that it requires high skills.
>It is more a recruitment issue
You won't reach more users with high skills by lowering the barier to join a team.
It is the opposite, to ensure that you get volunteers that are capable of doing the job right, you need to have some kind of tresshold.
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @00:11
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<i>What the wiki way showed us was: lower entrance barriers and the project will lift up. </i>
Looking at wikipedia.org, most Dutch translations are incomplete or outdated.
With wiki, it is true that the initial translation is easier, because of low entrance etc, but keeping the files up to date compared to their English equivalents is much more a pain than keeping po-files up to date.
<i>you have to contact the project and get involved</i>
Not necessary, but in general a good idea.
<i>you have to know what po and pot files are</i>
You only need to know that your working with po-files, just like you need to know that you are working with doc-files when writing a letter in MS Word..
<i>you have to get the right files.</i>
which are available from i18n.kde.org, just click on the right file to download it.
Or use a webbased system like pootle to organise the translation project, you can't translate the wrong file with pootle :)
<i>you need knowledge of KDE internals, SVN</i>
It's alway nice to know what you are translating, so knowledge of kde is indeed necessary.
But SVN knowledge?
Why?
<i>
Webbased tools for translations are of course a great contribution but currently third party.
</i>
Not true, there are several GPL-based versions, like pootle and another one of which i forgot the name of (the nameless one is part of the kde project)
Also, Wiki is third party..
<i>
There are today much more KDE users than 3 years ago. The translation infrastructure does not scale. It does not attract contributors.
</i>
That is not true.
Looking at the Dutch project, while a few years ago translating was allmost a one man job, now about 10 people are translating the desktop, and especially the documentation has never been this far translated in the past (currently 70%)
<i>
Community platforms such as KDE-look or KDE-APS were also a great example what can be achieved when you lower entrance barriers.</i>
You can't compare kde-look and kde-apps with translating software.
Things like wiki sound nice, but it is not in any way sufficient for translating software or docbookbased helpfiles.
First, a wiki does not have a translation memory. Without a translating memory, you need far more translators to do the job.
For example, the documentation of digikam contains about 28458 words (tags not included). Translating that amount of words would take several months. But since most of the chapters of the digikam documentation are using the same layout, about 60% of the docs can be automaticly translated with a tool called kbabel. Besides errorprone copy&paste, I can't think of a way with wiki that a translator can automaticly translate files based on earlier work from other files.
Another benefit of using po-files for documentation translation is that you don't have to deal with most of the tags and elements found in docbook sources of the kde help files. And the tags that are left over can be filled in with a single keystroke in kbabel.
That is also something I don't expect to do using a wiki-based translation.
Third, small changes in the original docbook-files are easy to find without the use of a diff-application.
Just checkout the sections in the po-files that are marked as 'fuzzy'
New and changed English strings are automaticly integrated in the po-files, and the translator only has to startup a po-editor like kbabel, or surf on the net to pootle, and move from fuzzy/untranslated to fuzzy/untranslated with just a single mouseclick or keystroke.
And last but not least, most translation projects resides in countries that don't have the luxury of flat-fee broad band internet. Using a wiki as translation tool (or any other kind of webbased solution) would mean that they need to use a dialup-connection with the internet while translating, which would make translating quite an expensive job to do...
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @08:46
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"With wiki, it is true that the initial translation is easier, because of low entrance etc, but keeping the files up to date compared to their English equivalents is much more a pain than keeping po-files up to date."
This is a problem of diffs. English as a primary documentation source, when the english version is changed, the translation has to adapt.
Wikipedia articles are usually not translations, so this is different. More articles about the same topic.
With KDE documentation it is 99% direct translation with perhaps other wording. So a change in the english original triggers a possible change need in the derived document.
> Things like wiki sound nice, but it is not in any way sufficient for translating software or docbookbased helpfiles.
It is not about using a wiki. It is about doing it the wiki way. Linux Professional Institute used a succesful system to get translations of articles on their website.
t7e http://www.lpi.org/en/projects.html
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @21:15
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>Wikipedia articles are usually not translations, so this is different. More articles about the same topic.
So you agree that a 'wiki' way of translating documents is not the option.
>It is not about using a wiki. It is about doing it the wiki way. Linux Professional Institute used a succesful system to get translations of articles on their website.
But this is not about websites or other 'instant publishing' mechanismen, we are talking about the translations applications and documents that have a release schedule, deadline, etc.
If your translation is finished, one day after the freeze, your translation is not included and won't be until the next release.
No wiki-kind of translation mechanism can avoid that.
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Re: Translation
by cl on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @04:53
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wrong stats link. This is the important one:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/essential.php
Doesn't look too bad to me.
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Re: Translation
by Aaron J. Seigo on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @08:56
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> The translation project does not scale anymore.
in what ways? can you offer some examples?
> There is a huge translation lag,
define "huge" and is this due to available person hours, # of strings needing to be translated, of translation patches being triaged? you're being a bit vauge here =)
> contributing is not as easy as it could be.
what would you suggest for improvements?
> And the translation infrastructure almost came to a standstill.
what infrastructure was this, and when did it "almost come to a standstill" exactly?
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @13:05
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I mean:
Do it the wiki way. Imagine I had twenty minutes left and want to translate a portion of a KDE doc. I do not want to subscribe to mailing list. I do not want to learn SVN or get to know po or pot files orr tools like kbabel.
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Re: Translation
by KDE User on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @13:14
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Translation of your ideas on translation: You don't want to do a good job properly and in the proper application context.
KDE needs serious and dedicated translators not people with low standards.
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @18:03
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The wikipedia way means recruiting high involvement people by low entrance barriers. The truth is that a core of 1000 supporters max writes most of the articles. it is alwways the 80-20 rule. But how do you get these people involved?
Translation is said to be a job for non-programmers but fact is it currently requires some skills, there are unecessary barriers.
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Re: Translation
by Morty on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @16:38
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Translating applications are NOT simply about changing strings to a new language, it is not that easy. And you also have to do testing and debugging of your translation, which imply actually running it with the translation. Spend some time reading the translation mailinglist and you would see.
But if you really want to use those twenty minutes of yours helping with translation of KDE, it's easier than with any wiki out there. You translate the documentation, it's the most neglected or lowest priority part of the translations too. As for the easy part, you only have to supply the text. The language maintainers will gladly help with markup, and integrating it into the correct place in svn. Since its' only text you can even write it directly in your e-mail client if you like, and send it to the appropriate maintainer.
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @18:05
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At a wiki you can edit it on the fly. html editing is also easys but the wiki way means, you see an error and just correct it.
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Re: Translation
by rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @05:57
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Hi can edit on the fly, that is true, but only when you are writing documentations.
Not when you create translations of documentations.
An initial translation in a wiki is quite easy, but keeping it up to date according to changes in the English version is not.
For example, if the English author changes 6 words in a document containing 25.000 words, in order to reflect GUI-changes in the next release of KDE, how is the translator supposed to find those changes in his translation?
If you look at wikipedia.org you will notice that most localised articles are not translations of the original English versions, most of the time they are rewrites that contain some, but not all, of the information that is available in the English version, most of the times complemented with information that is of interest to the audience of that language.
And again, most translated documents on wikipedia.org are outdated or contain less information then their English counterpart.
If wiki is so great for translating, why can't wikipedia (with a much larger audience then localised kde-versions) keep up the pace???
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @08:11
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I don't mean document editing via a wiki which might be a good proposal.
I mean the principle of wiki: low entrance barrier for participation.
> And again, most translated documents on wikipedia.org are outdated or contain less information then their English counterpart.
German articles are usually independend from the English ones, not translations of their English counterparts.
> An initial translation in a wiki is quite easy, but keeping it up to date according to changes in the English version is not.
Diffs are your friend.
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @21:06
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>I mean the principle of wiki: low entrance barrier for participation.
Not suitable for translating software
You need some barrier, in order to maintain quality.
>Diffs are your friend.
No, they are not :)
Not when it comes to translations..
using diffs would mean that you need 3 files, the old English file, the new English file, and the translation.
Not very usefull...
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Re: Translation
by david on Monday 27/Jun/2005, @00:44
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>>I mean the principle of wiki: low entrance barrier for participation.
>Not suitable for translating software
>You need some barrier, in order to maintain quality.
Equally unsuitable for an encyclopeadia then, since you need to maintain quality there too.
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Re: Translation
by rinse on Monday 27/Jun/2005, @00:56
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Well, you should at least keep in mind that a wiki encyclopeadia could contain errros.
But the difference between an wiki encyclopeadia and is that the lather uses instant publishing. You read the article, you notice an error, you change it, and it gets published as soon as you hit the 'publish' button (or similar)
This is not the case with software documentation, if you find an error and correct it, the improved docs won't be available until the next version of the application, which could take 6 months or even longer (depending on the release cycle the application uses...)
So in short, while a wiki encyclopeadia with a large audience would quite fast gain in quality, it would take a lot longer before software documentation would reach the same quality level if it was translated in the same way.
Also, users who don't upgrade everytime a new version of the application comes out, will be using the documentation with errors for a very long time..
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Re: Translation
by ac on Monday 27/Jun/2005, @04:40
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That's indeed commonly claimed to be a weakness of wikis.
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Re: Translation
by rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @06:01
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Well, if you don't want to spent time looking at the specs that the translation team of your language uses, the chance that your translation is actually useable is very small.
20 minutes of your translation on the fly would mean 1 hour of my time trying to correct your errors in consistency, etc.
If that is what a new infrastructure should bring, then no thanks.
Rather have a small dedicated team that produces translations of an acceptable quality, but a bit lower quantity, then a large translation team without any structure that gives high quantity and nice stats, but no quality at all..
Rinse
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Re: Translation
by Andre on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @08:17
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Same problem for wikipedia. Your small team cannot keep up with 3rd party applications. In wikipedia we have the quality offensive.
you can also lock parts as you can lock pages.
you can enable comments as in the wiki discussion page
> 20 minutes of your translation on the fly would mean 1 hour of my time trying to correct your errors in consistency, etc.
Don't think so. the usual process would be not to adopt the patch and say "see this spec, improve and resubmit".
It is all about getting people involved.
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Re: Translation
by Rinse on Saturday 25/Jun/2005, @21:20
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>the usual process would be not to adopt the patch and say "see this spec, improve and resubmit".
Yes, and the new, improved and resubmitted version comes in one day after the release of the software resulting in an unfinished translation shipped with the application.
Not much different from the current situation :o)
Wiki is great for what it is meant for: instant publishing of articles.
With software, this is different, because the translation are not instantly published, but packaged with a certain release.
So if the translation is not 100% at release time, the application will be partially translated until the next release..
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