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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Fwd: branches/stable/l10n-kde4
From:       Chusslove Illich <caslav.ilic () gmx ! net>
Date:       2010-06-29 9:03:55
Message-ID: 201006291103.56333.caslav.ilic () gmx ! net
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>> [: Vít Pelčák :]
>> If I were you, I'd wait for few days until dust settles down and then
>> start Summit.
>>
>> http://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Workflows/PO_Summit
>>
>> It helps you keep stable and trunk pretty well in sync and you don't have
>> to care which branch you are translating.
>
> [: Albert Astals Cid :]
> Which is Ok if you have lots of manpower but wastes lots of translations
> if you are in short number.

This could be true under a certain composition of unfavorable circumstances,
but presently in KDE most of those unfavorable circumstances are missing.

Even if the team just translates summit catalogs with a dumb editor (i.e.
anything but Lokalize or power-assisted Kate), I estimate the wasted work to
be at most 2-4%. How do I get this number? 2-4% is the number of messages
only found in trunk just prior to next 4.x branching. Assuming that each and
every of those new messages in trunk got "completely changed" once between
introduction and branching (an overassumption), and that all got translated
before being changed (an overassumption), you end up with the same 2-4% of
wasted work.

And there are improvements and benefits to this.

Since it's more likely that new messages, especially longer messages, will
receive discrete changes (capitalization, punctuation, style), the
availability of diffs will make updating translations to those messages take
less effort. Lokalize provides these diffs automatically, and with Kate one
can pass catalogs through Pology's diff-previous sieve.

It is also possible to just translate stable messages in a summit catalog
when time is short. It requires a simple filtering option from the editor,
which would skip non-stable messages when jumping to next non-translated
message. When I want to do this, since I translate with Kate I use
tag-untranslated sieve to mark only stable non-translated messages with a
flag, and then jump through them (inputing a seach string once and pressing
F3). This cannot be done fully within Lokalize though (anyone care to make a
patch?), but one can use Pology's find-messages sieve to open only stable
messages in Lokalize, with parameters -sbranch:stable -slokalize. (Note that
this is different from native two-branch workflow in Lokalize in that the
translator still deals with one set of files only, and can perform all non-
update related operations, such as terminology changes, without going
through branches twice.)

The unexpected benefit is that, due to ordering of messages in summit
catalogs, translator will sometimes see an improved trunk message just
before the stable message (e.g. context added), and thus when updating the
trunk message be able to immediatelly correct the stable translation too if
necessary.

All this results in a situation that some would find curious, but which I
have anticipated: the teams currently using the summit are all short on
manpower, while those with lots of manpower (I understand that noone has
trully "lots of manpower", so just comparatively: German, French,
Spanish...) do not. That's because well manned and well organized teams can
anyway keep everything smoothly running without overload to any one team
member, so they have little incentive to switch to summit (adapting the
custom automation, reconditioning the vast horde of translators), while for
1-4 member team (yes, including 1, and in particular for 1) the benefit of
working on one branch at all times well outweighs possible wasted work
(which can be nearly zero, as I explained above).

Thruth be told, currently only 5 teams use the summit, so statistically I
cannot claim everyone will likely find it an improvement. On the other
hand, no team so far has started using the summit and then pulled back.

-- 
Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)
Serbian KDE translation team

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