Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Insufficient privileges for saving translations

Hi Regis, *,

On Fri, Apr 5, 2024 at 9:03 AM Regis Perdreau <regis.perdreau@gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem arises in all languages, and in many languages, sugesters
> remain sugesters forever.

Each language team is free to handle it how they feel fit. Some allow
anonymous suggestions, some require users to be registered, some have
everyone being able to translate directly, others prefer to use
suggestions/to review submissions before integrating.

> How many sugesters become translators each year?
> There are absolutely no official criteria for becoming a translator; you
> are subject to the judgement of the "official" translators...

Yes, that's basically it. The ones dealing with the translation for
many years already decide on how translation should happen, they are
the ones who can judge best. It is unfortunate, but not everyone who
shows up to contribute does so in good faith (thankfully rare to have
trolls, but apparently not unheard of), but some might show up with
good intentions, but are just not familiar with LibreOffice/the terms
used and introduce lots of inconsistency and thus confusion. That of
course is partly to blame on the language not working to create a
glossary of the common terms, but that's mostly due to the history of
the project/that there was no way to create a glossary in the old
translation system.../not everything can be covered by a glossary.
Starts with the level of politeness the user should be addressed and
goes to specific terms for stuff like cursor vs caret, etc.

> Should we
> wait for translators to retire and sugesters to become rare?

No - of course when the previous translators are not responsive and
someone shows up to carry the torch, there's no problem in granting
the necessary privileges, but as long as there's an active
translator/an active translation team there's no need to change the
policy/having admins bypass their wishes and willy-nilly grant
privileges - that will only result in them leaving. (and I personally
would rather keep those who are already known to stick with the
project than risking putting the translation onto a newbie that might
lose interest in the next month already - pissing off the ones with
experience just to not come across as "difficult" is a bad choice from
my POV).

I think it isn't really a big problem that not everyone can make
direct translations, after all even people with translation privileges
still sometimes chose to submit something as a suggestion - of course
hard to know the details since naturally most of those discussions
likely happen in the corresponding NL-lists/communication channels and
do not end up on this list.

> I think weblate was a very bad choice.

Weblate has nothing to do with it, that policy would be the same in any tool.
You might have other reasons why you think weblate is a bad choice,
but how the LibreOffice project decides to manage permissions
certainly is not a problem with weblate. You could give anyone
translate permissions in weblate as well, it is just something we
think would be a bad idea, again proven by the hesitation by the
Korean team who had trolls in other projects already.
It is the same with source-code contributions - we don't give anyone
direct-commit privileges from the get-go. We accept patches in gerrit
from anyone, but only after the user did show that the quality of the
contributions is good and not just a one-off, then ESC can suggest
granting the privileges.

Also suggestions and accepting them  isn't the only way the project
can handle it, the alternative would be translation with review or
setting up suggestions with voting - but that is more or less the
same/would make more sense in larger translation teams.

> TDF never speaks about sugesters in
> translation report
> (see
> https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/06/09/libreoffice-native-language-projects-tdfs-annual-report-2022/
> )

That's also not a fair representation, since that also doesn't
explicitly mention translators/doesn't make any distinction between
users with direct submission privileges and those who are "only"
suggesting. The document speaks about the language community, and that
includes both translators and suggestors.
Same with our dashboard, that also includes suggestions in the default
view/stats

> There was a survey, what are the conclusions and which step next ?

The results of the survey were published here:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/03/29/results-from-our-survey-of-libreoffice-localisation-tooling-and-workflows/

And next steps are to add machine translation.... But participation
was quite low and not everyone feels the same about any issue, so
naturally people rely on feedback.

Also I strongly disagree that users with suggestions wouldn't get
credit for that. Weblate shows suggestions in the user profile and our
dashboard reflects that as well.

If you have examples where suggestions are ignored in terms of giving
people credit, then please point those out, those omissions are
certainly not intentional.

Also if there are problems in suggestions not being acted upon, either
being rejected or accepted or commented-on, then raise the issue and
I'm sure there will be a solution.

ciao
Christian

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