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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Use Pontoon for l10n
From:       Karl Ove Hufthammer <karl () huftis ! org>
Date:       2019-03-31 12:52:44
Message-ID: 4fac4a9f-b5a5-c1ff-791a-56bb70f82a98 () huftis ! org
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Adrián Chaves skreiv 31.03.2019 14:27:
> It would be great if you could specify which aspects of a version control
> system like Subversion you feel should be kept, beyond pulling and
> pushing local changes.


I need pulling and pushing (of several files at once), with 
corresponding log messages and author attribution. And it must be 
possible to look at (and check out) older revisions of the files and 
easily show diffs between different revisions. Normal SVN/Git stuff, 
basically.

At it needs to be *fast*, and not mangle/change the commited files.

I work as a translator on very many free software projects, so I have 
experienced most of the online systems (Transifex, Rosetta, Launchpad, 
Weblate, PoEditor, …, though not Pontoon) that provide some sort of 
offline support. (Projects which only have online translation support I 
just avoid, as it's too hard and time-consuming to provide high-quality 
translation for them.) And all the systems have been royal PITA to use. 
So it's natural that I'm sceptical of yet another online platform.

Some common problems I've experienced with other systems:

– Slow (can only checkout/commit a single file at once, which takes 
several seconds)
– Non-robust (the offline download/upload client quits in the middle of 
a long download/upload process whenever it encounters a temporary 
network/server error (which is quite common)
– They mangle the files, e.g. by removing or adding fuzzy status, 
removing translation comments and/or removing author attribution (and 
license information!)
– They don't handle moving or renaming of files at all
– They create syntactically invalid translation files, or translation 
files missing crucial information
– They often reformat the strings in the files
– They sometimes fill in translation suggestions without marking them as 
fuzzy (and some just fill in the English strings as translations for 
strings that don't have a translation yet!)
– Some don't have command-line client
– Some don't support the ‘fuzzy' status but have their own ‘reviewed' 
status, so that we need to manually ‘review' each string on the online 
platform *after* uploading the PO files
– Some don't have any access control, encouraging ‘drive-by translation' 
(which results in very low-quality translation)

SVN and Git where the translators have direct commit process, on the 
other hand, just *works*. It's blazingly fast, easy, and the translators 
can use their custom scripts and tools to automate process and provide 
proper QA.

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer
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