On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Dashamir for your experience. I'm trying to understand more on
> B-Translator.

I am pleased that you are trying to understand more.

To help your understanding, just keep in mind that
B-Translator is meant to be a feedback collection tool
(although its name seems to be a bit misleading).
So, its goal is a little bit different from TranslateWiki
and other online translation systems. This is why it
has multiple suggestions and votes and other features
that normally would be strange for a translation system.

Its aim is not to replace any existing translation tools,
but to bridge the gap between the translators and the
users, to encourage users to get involved into the
translation process by making small contributions,
to facilitate discussions about translations, to build
a community of people interested on translations,
which is wider than just the translators, to advertise
the translations and the translation process into the
social networks and to attract people into this
translation community.

If you have a look at https://l10n.org.al you may
have a better idea of what I am trying to explain.
Of course it is not finished yet (although it is working),
and there are a lot of things that can be improved,
but I didn't give up yet, I am still working on it.

In case that you would like to install a local copy,
in order to test it better, it can be done easily, but
still let me know so that I can help you.

>         On "However this merge is a bit difficult": it's not with
> translatewiki.net. The system takes care of all merge and commit activity in
> the translators' stead. Even if for some reason someone commits translations

My point was that it is difficult to do it correctly
without human intervention. You can do it automatically,
but you cannot ensure that it is done correctly,
and you cannot guarantee the quality of the translations.

>         I hope this helps; sorry if I missed your points... bridging online
> and offline translation communities is complicate because it's so hard to
> understand each other. :) That's why Niklas announced his upcoming

No, the offline translation community are the people who
are doing the work, and they have done it successfully for
many years. They don't have to understand us, we should
understand them. Just tell me how many KDE projects have
you translated into your language? I have translated only one,
to get familiar with the process, and I did it with Lokalize.
Without putting ourselves into their shoes, we cannot
understand them.

> presentation 4 months earlier, to collect more information in the meanwhile
> and prepare a more complete proposal that will allow a constructive
> discussion at Akademy and will hopefully provide some language teams with
> something they'll like and find useful enough to adopt it.

That's the correct attitude. Try to build something that people
would like, and would enjoy using, and would be better than
what they are currently using. But you cannot do it without
first understanding how they are working currently.

I wish you good luck,
Dashamir