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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Looking at wikipedia.org, most Dutch translations are incomplete or outdated.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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