[fab] Correspondence from a wandering board member

[Karsten Wade]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 23:13 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

> . gettexts model of having English as the "master" language is a real
> problem when the translators do not speak English, and shuts out
> translations for a bunch of native languages where English was not the
> language of the conquerors/colonists. In this case, the translators know
> Spanish and Quecha, but not English, so they cannot make sense of the .po
> file that has English phrases as the keys for the Quecha translations.

I've been wondering about the Lingua Franca problem, but mainly from a
perspective of documentation, where the original (source) and target
languages might have nothing to do with English.

I wonder if a short-term fix that only addresses the master language
situation might help.  We could create a Web app in the translator's
workspace that lets them pick a set of packages and have a POT file
created from a different language.

Paul -- do you think this might work?

It would be very interesting.  We would have to chain the trust for
editing.  That is, the Quecha team would use the Spanish translation as
the master, so they would rely upon the quality of the English ->
Spanish.  The Spanish team would have to be aware that they were now an
upstream POT-file for another language, and have a process of how to
respond.

Theoretically, we could have a trust model so that I know, when I see
the Quecha translations as "all green", I know that i) the Spanish ->
Quecha is QA'd and ready, and ii) that only occurs *after* the English
-> Spanish is QA'd and ready.

Cascading changes would be a pain.  A typo fix in the original would
have to trigger a notice to the Spanish and Quecha teams, with the
latter waiting for the Spanish team to commit a new translation fix
before proceeding.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor    ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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