GSoC ideas on L10n engineering and Transifex

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Nils Philippsen <nphilipp at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 00:27 +0200, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
>  > Better late than never, I've put together some ideas for Google Summer
>  > of Code projects on L10n engineering and Transifex:
>  >
>  >   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerCoding/2008/Ideas#transifex
>  >
>  > If you're interested in any of them, contact me directly or for more
>  > information.
>
>  Here's another idea I mailed to Dim directly. While some usability
>  things have been added to the Wiki page in the meantime, I'd like to
>  propose this here as well:
>
>  > I was wondering if the current workflow for translators could be
>  > improved. AIUI, a translator downloads the .po file from
>  > translate.fp.org or vcs.fedoraproject.org, changes things and pushes
>  > these through Tx.
>  >
>  > I think it'd be beneficial if they could at least download and submit
>  > po files from the same place, or better yet have an additional
>  > web-based PO file editor (does such a thing exist?) where they can
>  > edit the files in-place. This would lower the bar for becoming a
>  > translator tremendously as somebody wanting to contribute in that area
>  > would only need a web browser and few skills beyond the actual
>  > translating.
>  >
>  > As an idea, this could just list the strings that need translation,
>  > one after the other, with a textarea where the translator could type
>  > in the translation, everything else would be read-only. It could also
>  > warn the user if the string contains potential pitfalls like Python
>  > positional parameters (which are a bit confusing to people new to it)
>  > and check if they source positional parameters are translated well.
>
>  Dim's answer pretty much boiled down to that this would mean integration
>  of Pootle[1] with Transifex and after skimming over its pages, and
>  trying out the interface, I agree. Dim, do you think it makes sense to
>  spell it out as such on the GSOC wiki page?
>
>  [1]: Pootle: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/

I think having a GSoC project specifically targeting integration with
Pootle (and any other great tool out there) is a *great* idea.

This will probably mean some work on the Pootle side to make it "read"
stuff from Tx's API. Basically abstract some operations and use the
configuration to choose the targets for some operations. AFAIK, the
Pootle folks are eager to see such a project be realized as well. :-)
They've worked the past year(s) in moving functionality from Pootle
into the Translate Toolkit, so some (or most) of the stuff needed
might be put into the toolkit, to be shared with other projects as
well.

There is another GSoC idea for extending the API and JSON-ifying
everything (/wiki/SummerCoding/2008/Ideas#tx_client), so some
interaction (not much though) with that student would be helpful.

Looking forward for any student wanting to work on this, and mentors
willing to help out in mentoring our potential Transifex proposals.
:-)

-d



-- 
Dimitris Glezos
Jabber ID: glezos at jabber.org, GPG: 0xA5A04C3B
http://dimitris.glezos.com/

"He who gives up functionality for ease of use
loses both and deserves neither." (Anonymous)
--