[libreoffice-l10n] Re: l10n process, en_US version, Help files

Hi Sophie, *,

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Sophie <gautier.sophie@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> *Before updating Pootle:
> - it's important for l10n team to know the approx load of work that will
> be needed to achieve the whole work. Time between beta1 and rc1 is short
> and that will help to better organize this time between translation and
> proof reading.
> - depending also on the type of changes, we could use different tools to
> optimize the work.

Don't think this applies to a new minor version, as a new project is
created, the old one just renamed, so you immediately see in the new
project how much work is left. And only with that info you can decide
what meaningful way there is to minimize actual translation work.

> *When the l10n start:
> - we need a continuous communication and a planing of the updates made
> in Pootle, those translating off line are always frightened to lose
> something in the run.
> - it's exhausting when you think you are over and to see a new bunch of
> words coming. Knowing it in advance help to manage the time too

Yes, of course, and let me reiterate: I did not update any templates
in December. Whoever else did update them did so without prior notice.
I fully agree that before templates are updated l10n teams should be warned.
(but then again, I don't consider adding a new project as updating
templates in this regard - if the new data is wrong, just copy from
the old project, no loss, no additional work, no mixup with offline
translations)

> *After RC1 and l10n integration
> - we need to know when integration is made after our fixes, there is
> currently no communication on this

For every build it is the same: Translations are extracted from pootle
on Tuesday and committed before tagging. Deadline for each tag is
Monday. So if you add your changes on Monday, all is fine, your
translations will be included. If you wait till Tuesday, your changes
might be missed.

The release schedule overview is available here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan
or more detailed for the next relevant releases:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/4.2#4.2.0_release
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/4.1#4.1.5_release

There you see the dates for the relevant releases, and also in the
case of a new feature release the UI and string freeze dates.

If you look at the 4.2.0 schedule, you see that English string freeze
is next week (Monday, Dec 16) - so that is the week I did plan for
updating the templates in pootle.
I will grab the translations on Tuesday as for every build, (that way
there is a copy of the transations in the sourcecode, in case
something goes wrong with updating the templates), and after that
would add the new templates to pootle for l10nprojects to update.

Then l10n projects have a month to adapt to those late changes.

> ==> for these three items, I have asked today to Andras and Christian
> how we can put that in place and where I can help them to do so, knowing
> also that Christian is managing this part almost alone now.

Yes, 4.2.0 was the first time I did update the projects in pootle, and
I personally think it was not a huge desaster. There were two
stumbling stones:
1) update_against_templates aborting because of added/renamed files
2) lots of changes in help that only affect metadata (the xml-tag
attributes), not the actual translations

first was causing only a fraction of the changes to show up, leading
to the impression that almost nothing changes, and after that was
fixed, the second one caused a huge string count to be displayed,
probably making some translators think that suddenly their
translations were deleted or something, since after 1) they thought
they were almost finished.
2) was fixed with a script shortly afterwards, leaving only the real
changes to process.


Now what happened in December is a completely different story, esp.
that kk project did end up having Greek translation is still a
mystery, but not related to any updates.

> *About the en_US overall quality
> - [...]
> - but that doesn't solve the several typos that already exist and that
> are overlooked by the l10n team (e.g in the Character > Font Effect
> dialog,

Those that have been reported on the list have been fixed by Andras or
me in the code - and people are very welcome to upload a patch to
gerrit themselves. (
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/gerrit )

> - that doesn't solve also the lack of universal vocabulary used in
> several dialogs (e.g Tab/Pane/Panel/Deck to name the same object or
> Graphic/Picture/Image). I've nothing to propose here but to define a
> glossary where developers could pick the good word but I'm not sure it
> will be used

Graphic/Picture/Image is for example one of the changes that have
already been somewhat unified for 4.2 - but yes, a
terminology/glossary doesn't really exist.

> * About the help files
> [...]
> May be, but I don't know how heavy it would be for developers, the
> solution would be to open an issue with a special tag like NF for each
> new feature, with three lines about what the feature is supposed to
> do.

Yes, this is a flaw by the committer/reviewers, who let the new
functionality pass into the code without making sure documentation is
created as well.

I guess it would help a lot if there is a group willing to write the
documentation when devs just say something like "I changed/added
functionality xy, please adapt the documentation to it"
Having devs write the documentation themselves doesn't necessarily
make it helpful :-)

ciao
Christian

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