Pootle & Virtaal

l10n
#1

Hi,

I'm conducting a comparative study for my Master Thesis. It is about FOSS
Localisation and, in particular, it focuses on a comparison between Pootle
and Virtaal. Is there anyone who uses both? I need active users to complete
an online survey included in the study.

If you would like to help me, here is the survey link :

http://etuunige.limequery.org/index.php/296662/lang-en

Thanks a lot,

Valeria

#2

Hi Valeria,

Hi,

I'm conducting a comparative study for my Master Thesis. It is about FOSS
Localisation and, in particular, it focuses on a comparison between Pootle
and Virtaal. Is there anyone who uses both? I need active users to complete
an online survey included in the study.

I use both, but for me it's two different tools, one is an online tool
the other a local one. I use Pootle as a project repository and Virtaal
to translate. I would see more a comparison between OmegaT and Virtaal :slight_smile:
Kind regards
Sophie

#3

Hi Sophie!

Thanks for replying.

In particular this survey is just part of a study analysing non-experienced
translators' reaction to Pootle and Virtaal. I would like to figure out
which tool would be better for a beginner in FOSS projects.
On the other hand, the survey aims to collect active users' opinions, so
that I can compare two opposite points of view (experienced /
non-experienced users).

Thanks for your help! =)

Valeria

#4

I've answered your survey but in general, I found it too binary i.e. whether I prefer Pootle or Virtaal depends on what the task is. I tried to give this info as much as I could but to sum it up for you, too coordinate a translation projects with many collaborators, a Pootle server is really useful. Like LibreOffice. But if you have a really small team and there aren't 100s of po files, Virtaal is more effective.

Michael

05/11/2014 21:57, sgrìobh Valeria Siano:

#5

Thank you so much Michael for your help! I agree with you: there's no need
to choose and, as you said, it depends.

At first the study only included experiments with some translation students
who have never used these tools. But then I decided to include this survey
because I think that users who usually localise with these tools can more
than others evaluate them. So it's above all to have a more complete view.

Valeria

#6

Hi :slight_smile:
I've not seen the survey request appear on the Ubuntu Translators mailing
list yet. It's fairly low traffic so it might be a good one to join.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators

It might be good to try a few other distros lists too. DistroWatch is a
good place to find links to almost any distro;
http://www.distrowatch.com

If you already have a few distros in mind then you can use short-cuts to
get to their back-pages to find the links to their documentation and
support and such-like, for example;
http://www.distrowatch.com/arch
http://www.distrowatch.com/fedora
http://www.distrowatch.com/mint
http://www.distrowatch.com/centos
http://www.distrowatch.com/suse

Redhat might be too difficult to reach so CentOS or Scientific Linux might
be better examples from the Redhat families and they might be kind enough
to help you get onto the Redhat lists. Err "Linux Mint" is in the Debian
family, same as Ubuntu.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#7

Hi Valeria, *,

In particular this survey is just part of a study analysing non-experienced
translators' reaction to Pootle and Virtaal. I would like to figure out
which tool would be better for a beginner in FOSS projects.

I think the comparison of those two is bad, since they serve different purposes.

I won't recommend anyone to start translating from scratch using
pootle for example. If you start off with lots of untranslated
strings, then offline translation is much more convenient and faster.
But if you're nearing completion and have a larger team that
translates concurrently, then using something like pootle comes in
handy. (suggestions / reviewer / immediate update to avoid duplicate
work...)

So the premise is: Does a translator join a nearly complete project,
or does he start with ~nothing translated already.

Also from a project level/non-translator POV having a central source
for the translations is very convenient. No need to ask translators to
send in their files and then likely having to process them further.
Just grabbing all translations from pootle and having a %-translated
overview for all languages is a nice thing to have.

ciao
Christian

#8

Hi Valeria, *,

You could have explained your point of view in the comments field of the
survey. I think it's very useful for my study to have this kind of remarks.

I didn't do the survey - it didn't let me preview through the
questions before deciding whether to spend time on it and didn't
provide me any info on how many questions there are (just the "less
than 20 minutes" statement). And also didn't explain to what extend
"native languages" is meant. Being fluent in?, etc. So I moved on and
just replied to the comments in this thread.

(And I'm not an active translator either)

ciao
Christian