Wiki » Translation workflow

Introduction

Glossary

First I have to define some works because there may be ambiguities: Transifex uses the following structure: Every translatable thing (sorry, I can't think of a better word) like a tool, the rpm summaries and so on is called a project. The pot/po files are called the resources of the project.
Transifex uses the following access control modells:

1. Free for all - Any logged in user can translate anything within this project
2. Limited access - There are fixed teams for any language, only members of those teams can work on their translations in this project
3. Outsourced access - Like Limited access but teams are taken from another project (the so called outsource project), not administrated by the project maintainer himself

Here comes a list of special words I will use:

• translator - everyone with an account for our tx
• committer - chosen ones from each language team, are coordinators for their team and have an svn account
• tx-maintainer - the person creating a project is automatically its maintainer. The maintainer has the permissions to choose the access control model, to administrate its teams, to upload resources and to give others co-maintainership
• source-maintainer - the developer of the tool, that is to be translated

Workflow proposal

Normal operations

• The source-maintainer creates his/her project. He chooses Outsourced access as access control model and "Mageia i18n teams" as Outsource project and gives co-maintainership to the i18n team leader and substitute. He notifies those "exculted personages" of this move.
• The above mentioned "exculted personages" inform the i18n folks via the ml of the new work.
• All people hurry to translate everything asap.
• When a translation is ready one of the committers of the affected language downloads the po file from tx and commits it to svn.
• at i18n string freeze, the commiters check their files, remove or correct wrong translations, download them and commit them to svn. Incomplete files are ok, too. Better to have some English strings mixed in then no or a false translation.

Exceptions

• The source-maintainer updates the pot file, when something changes in it. The rest should be done automatically by Transifex.

Comments

Please don't edit this part. I will collect important things for the sysadmins here...

• Source-maintainers will have to be in the tx-commiters group.
• #action obgr_seneca: write some tool to make commiting to svn one step (see comment Marek Lane)

Discussion

• Just say, what you think. The notes you write here together with the discussion on the ML will form the final workflow document.
• Marek Laane says: Don't know if it is possible but surely it would be better if committer could commit translation right from Tx.