From Fedora Project Wiki

Issues and Requirements for Fedora localization

Pressing Issues

  • Translators have to know too much technical skills to be able to contribute
    • We loose many translators who have good domain knowledge and linguistic skills, but little development-centric experience
  • Translators are unable to submit translations-updates for Fedora packages where Fedora is upstream
    • Translators are not familiar with the concepts of submitting patches against PO files in a release-tarball.
    • Transifex & Damned Lies only track translations in HEAD.
    • A similar issue has been for RHEL5.x where translators have been searching for RHEL VCS branches when really they should be submitting patches against a release tarball.
  • Usability Issues with the current Fedora Translation Infrastructure
    • Damned Lies displaying old or incorrect statistics
    • Damned Lies UI unresponsive or very slow at times
    • Damned Lies not being able to display statistics for Publican-based documents (many PO files pr document)
    • Damned Lies showing a lot of error messages and warnings that are confusing translators
    • Download (Damned Lies) and Upload (Transifex) as separate applications confuses translators
    • When submitting through Transifex, it takes a long time for statistics to reflect on Damned Lies status pages
    • Registration for participation as a Fedora translator is a long and tedious 9-step process with lots of technical challenges. suggested fix
    • When translating documents with many PO files, translators cannot upload or download multiple PO files at once
  • Translators must be able to flag a module at PO-download as 'is being translated/translation in progress'
    • regardless of contacts within a language-team a translator should be able to let others know a certain module is being translated, preferably with a time stamp. Maybe wise to add a deadline so translations doesn't get 'kidnapped' en never returned.

Translator Aids - for improving Translation Process

  • Translation Reuse and Terminology Management
  • Change Tracking, QA Process - being able to see who translated what
  • Tracking Upstream Translations, for Translation Reuse and backporting translation-changes
  • Notification on updates and changes through e.g. RSS and Email
  • Ease entry to translation - without sacrificing quality - through an optional web-based translation tool

Nice to Have - for future consideration but only conceptual ideas

  • Being able to push language-packs independently of main package
    • Language Maintainer the owner of the language-package
    • Allows teams to iteratively work on Fedora translation not limited to the 1 month 'string-freeze' period

Discussion