L10N/issues and requirements

Issues and Requirements for Fedora localization

Pressing Issues

• Translators have to know too much technical skills to be able to contribute
  • We loose many translators who have good domain knowledge and linguistic skills, but little development-centric experience
• Translators are unable to submit translations-updates for Fedora packages where Fedora is upstream
  • Translators are not familiar with the concepts of submitting patches against PO files in a release-tarball.
  • Transifex & Damned Lies only track translations in HEAD.
  • A similar issue has been for RHEL5.x where translators have been searching for RHEL VCS branches when really they should be submitting patches against a release tarball.
• Usability Issues with the current Fedora Translation Infrastructure
  • Damned Lies displaying old or incorrect statistics
  • Damned Lies UI unresponsive or very slow at times
  • Damned Lies not being able to display statistics for Publican-based documents (many PO files pr document)
  • Damned Lies showing a lot of error messages and warnings that are confusing translators
  • Download (Damned Lies) and Upload (Transifex) as separate applications confuses translators
  • When submitting through Transifex, it takes a long time for statistics to reflect on Damned Lies status pages
  • Registration for participation as a Fedora translator is a long and tedious 9-step process with lots of technical challenges. suggested fix
  • When translating documents with many PO files, translators cannot upload or download multiple PO files at once
• Translators must be able to flag a module at PO-download as 'is being translated/translation in progress'
  • regardless of contacts within a language-team a translator should be able to let others know a certain module is being translated, preferably with a time stamp. Maybe wise to add a deadline so translations doesn't get 'kidnapped' en never returned.

Translator Aids - for improving Translation Process

• Translation Reuse and Terminology Management
• Change Tracking, QA Process - being able to see who translated what
• Tracking Upstream Translations, for Translation Reuse and backporting translation-changes
• Notification on updates and changes through e.g. RSS and Email
• Ease entry to translation - without sacrificing quality - through an optional web-based translation tool

Nice to Have - for future consideration but only conceptual ideas

• Being able to push language-packs independently of main package
  • Language Maintainer the owner of the language-package
  • Allows teams to iteratively work on Fedora translation not limited to the 1 month 'string-freeze' period

Discussion

• See Talk Page for comments (eg. by Dimitris Glezos)