Behaviour of the "Needs editing" flag in Weblate

l10n
#1

Hello,

Currently TDF Weblate seems to be set up to revert to the original English string when a translated string is flagged as "needs editing". I.e. the English string is shown in the UI instead of the flagged translation. As the Weblate workflow in LibreOffice has not been documented yet, I don't know whether this is intentional or not. However, this is different from some other projects I have translated on other Weblate instances, so the behaviour may be different from what some people are used to.

Because of this, it's currently probably not a good idea to flag all strings needing editing as "needs editing" (as I initially did), but only to flag strings where the translation is clearly wrong or confusing enough that the English string is preferred. I think this limits the usefulness of the flag somewhat, but I guess comments could be used for the same purpose also.

Best regards,
Tuomas Hietala

#2

Hi Tuomas,

Hello,

Currently TDF Weblate seems to be set up to revert to the original
English string when a translated string is flagged as "needs editing".
I.e. the English string is shown in the UI instead of the flagged
translation. As the Weblate workflow in LibreOffice has not been
documented yet, I don't know whether this is intentional or not.
However, this is different from some other projects I have translated on
other Weblate instances, so the behaviour may be different from what
some people are used to.

Because of this, it's currently probably not a good idea to flag all
strings needing editing as "needs editing" (as I initially did), but
only to flag strings where the translation is clearly wrong or confusing
enough that the English string is preferred. I think this limits the
usefulness of the flag somewhat, but I guess comments could be used for
the same purpose also.

Could you send a direct link to an example of such string? Thanks in advance
Cheers
Sophie

#3

Hi Sophie,

I already unflagged many of them as I saw what was happening, but here's an example that I can cofirm showing up in English in Finnish-language LO as of 6.4.0: https://weblate.documentfoundation.org/translate/libo_ui-master/filtermessages/fi/?checksum=90e8d59d903deeb9

It's in the PDF export dialog, on the second tab from the left.

Best regards,
Tuomas

sophi kirjoitti 11.2.2020 16:02:

#4

Hi Tuomas

Hi Sophie,

I already unflagged many of them as I saw what was happening, but here's
an example that I can cofirm showing up in English in Finnish-language
LO as of 6.4.0:
https://weblate.documentfoundation.org/translate/libo_ui-master/filtermessages/fi/?checksum=90e8d59d903deeb9

It's in the PDF export dialog, on the second tab from the left.

That should not fall back to English if the string is fuzzy. I'll check
with Christian and let you know what is the setting there.
Cheers
Sophie

#5

Hi *,

>
> I already unflagged many of them as I saw what was happening, but here's
> an example that I can cofirm showing up in English in Finnish-language
> LO as of 6.4.0:
> https://weblate.documentfoundation.org/translate/libo_ui-master/filtermessages/fi/?checksum=90e8d59d903deeb9
>
> It's in the PDF export dialog, on the second tab from the left.

That should not fall back to English if the string is fuzzy.

That's default behaviour for gettext/msgfmt though. By default fuzzy
strings are ignored and not taken into account/are omitted from the
generated .mo file.
And fuzzy/needs work is default behaviour in weblate, so no changes
here. So if other projects treat fuzzy translations as valid in the
program, they either explicitly use the --use-fuzzy switch to msgfmt
or filter it out using some other means.

And traditionally it is used to flags strings that were
auto-translated during the update of templates, where the change looks
similar enough for the msgmerge program that it thinks the translation
is the same, but with slight changes that make it not 100% certain
about it. Sure it can be used by humans as well, but for that most
tools (at least the web-based ones) have replaced that by the concept
of suggestions. (but they would work similar fashion: unless it is
accepted the string will be treated as untranslated (or the current
translation will be used in case the suggestion is to change an
existing one)

Weblate would allow for a dedicated review workflow, in which a
translated string would still be listed as translated, but will still
be flagged for review.
This would be a project-wide setting though and not a language specific one.
https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-3.10.3/workflows.html#dedicated-reviewers

If it is about reviewing changes by new translators, you could also
use a project's history and advanced search.
There's history available under e.g.
https://weblate.documentfoundation.org/languages/fi/#history for all
projects for a language or
https://weblate.documentfoundation.org/languages/fi/libo_help-master/#history
for a specific project.

Also you can use search with advanced query tags, e.g.
changed:>=2020-01-01 AND NOT changed_by:cloph

for all changes done since January first and not done by me. (I assume
excluding a small group of reviewers here is easier than listing
"untrusted"/watched users here.)

tldr;
* fuzzy strings are considered untranslated
  → could be changed in msgfmt invocation
      → changing that requires consensus of ~all translation teams
* weblate would support review workflow
  → can only be changed on a per-project level
     → should have consensus by significant number of translation teams
     (not using the process will not break things per se, it just
means that permissions need to be tweaked that every translator can
also set their own translation as reviewed or people need to ignore
"needs review" state)
* weblate has history/powerful search that can be used to review
strings manually/in batch without a special flag
  → no consensus needed/each project can do whatever they want
     → manual work/need to manually keep track of "last checked date"
or similar.

ciao
Christian

#6

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I think perhaps the key issue here is Weblate using the words "Needs editing" with two quite different meanings, depending on the configuration. In some projects hosted on other Weblate instances, "Needs editing" basically means "I'll let this one pass for now but someone needs to take a look at it at some point" whereas currently in TDF Weblate it means "Nope, not gonna fly, this one goes immediately back to the drawing board". But this is of course not specifically related to LO/TDF and should probably be addressed upstream.

I'm fine with the current configuration, too, but I think it will keep causing surprises to translators in the future if it's not documented properly. With regard to search, in Weblate it mostly works very well, but is not the answer here when the problem is how to mark found dubious strings for later review/editing. As for the review workflow, I have no experience of it but I'd guess it would probably need more active translators than the Finnish l10n team currently has to be worthwhile.

Cheers,
Tuomas

Christian Lohmaier kirjoitti 14.2.2020 16:53:

#7

My bad memory then, sorry for the wrong assertion and thanks for
correcting me. I'll add it to the wiki :slight_smile:
Cheers
Sophie