[The Document Foundation – Pootle server] message by Luka Ramishvili

l10n
#1

Hello LibreOffice team!

I saw that the georgian version of the site needed translation, so I went to the pootle server and started writing translations. After translating 10-15 strings, I noticed that my changes weren't saved. I stopped translating as my work was fruitless.

My advice would be to put any type of warnings/notifications to notify the user what's she doing.
1. If I needed to log in before starting making changes, I shouldn't have been allowed to write translations that weren't meant to be saved.
2. If the changes are submitted for approval before appearing on the site, that should be mentioned somewhere.
3. The site let me navigate through the 10-15 translations I did, and there was an empty space on the right side. As I (correctly) guessed, that space on the right were table <td>-s meant for previewing translations (div.translation.translation-view), but they were empty. There wasn't even any indication that that space was reserved for previewing translations (and btw, why were they empty when I had entered translations?).
4. Is utf-8 allowed? I guess yes, but theoretically that can be the cause of the problem, as my language requires UTF-8.

I would provide significant contribution were I able to, maybe translating the site for 10-20%, because I was determined to do so (and had the time needed). I suggest potential contributors like me are vital for the continued development of the project. Don't let their attention slip away by bugs that undermine their willingness to work and lose work submitted by them.

Sincerely,
Your dedicated user,
Luka Ramishvili

#2

Hello Luka,

2012.09.23 09:33, luka.ramishvili@gmail.com rašė:

I saw that the georgian version of the site needed translation, so I went to the pootle server and started writing translations. After translating 10-15 strings, I noticed that my changes weren't saved. I stopped translating as my work was fruitless.

first of all, out apologies for this inconvenience. I know how it feels to translate same strings more than once and then see your work disappear. What you discovered here is probably a bug in Pootle (the system we are using). Bugs happen... Thanks for reporting this one!

My advice would be to put any type of warnings/notifications to notify the user what's she doing.
1. If I needed to log in before starting making changes, I shouldn't have been allowed to write translations that weren't meant to be saved.

I think I see what has happened: you've been filling the fields and clicking on the "Next" link, right? Well here's the thing: that link is NOT a submit nor a suggest button. It just allows you to skip a string and proceed to the next one. Question is why Pootle would display a text field which you cannot submit at all... I know we have at least one Pootle core developer on the l10n mailing list, perhaps he will have an idea why this field is needed there. Although it seems that this issue has been mitigated in the next generation of Pootle where the textarea is not editable until you log in.

2. If the changes are submitted for approval before appearing on the site, that should be mentioned somewhere.

Like I said, apparently, the changes were not submitted at all. However, if you had rights to suggest strings only (as opposed to submitting them), you would see the "Suggest" button. That would be indicative enough, I hope?

3. The site let me navigate through the 10-15 translations I did, and there was an empty space on the right side. As I (correctly) guessed, that space on the right were table <td>-s meant for previewing translations (div.translation.translation-view), but they were empty. There wasn't even any indication that that space was reserved for previewing translations (and btw, why were they empty when I had entered translations?).

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what page or div you are talking about here.

4. Is utf-8 allowed? I guess yes, but theoretically that can be the cause of the problem, as my language requires UTF-8.

UTF-8 is the encoding used by Pootle, so yes, it is definitely allowed.

I would provide significant contribution were I able to, maybe translating the site for 10-20%, because I was determined to do so (and had the time needed). I suggest potential contributors like me are vital for the continued development of the project. Don't let their attention slip away by bugs that undermine their willingness to work and lose work submitted by them.

Once again, apologies for that... The tool we use is not perfect, but it's open-source too, so hopefully it will become better as time goes. In fact, I *know* that the next major version currently being baked is already much more pleasant to work with.
Luka, I suggest that you proceed by doing the following:
1. Register with Pootle and send your user name here (to the l10n list) so I (or some other Pootle admin) can grant you the rights necessary to suggest or submit translations. It seems to me like our Georgian localization is currently unmaintained, so you'd probably be granted submit rights right away.
2. Try to get in touch with libreoffice.ge@gmail.com, as that email is indicated on our wiki [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Language_Teams] as belonging to our current Georgian team lead (I'm cc'ing that person on this message too). It would be good to know if he's still interested in localizing LibO.
3. Subscribe to the l10n list (you'll find the subscribe link on our Pootle's home page). This is not mandatory, but greatly encouraged and is generally useful.

I hope the inconvenience you had with Pootle won't hurt your enthusiasm too much. LibreOffice is a community-driven project, so love our contributors more than anything. :slight_smile:
Best regards,
Rimas Kudelis

#3

Hi Luka,

thanks for your warm words! :slight_smile: I'll respond to some points below.

2012.09.23 13:18, Luka Ramishvili wrote:

Thanks for your promptly answer, I was pleasantly surprised to see an answer on Sunday morning :slight_smile:

There's no need for apologies. I'll always be a free software volunteer by heart, but I was afraid that other potential users could turn away after being confused, that's why I contacted you.

Thanks. Apparently, you fell victim to Pootle's bug 1785: http://bugs.locamotion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1785. I've just applied the patch from that bug, so you'll probably be the last one to have this unpleasant experience. I've also filed bug 2552 (http://bugs.locamotion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2552) with a suggestion to make the problem of lacking permissions even more obvious.

I understand the issues you outlined so thoroughly. No, there wasn't a Suggest button, probably the textarea was showing despite my lack of permissions.
I have experience with gettext() and Poedit and by seeing how Pootle was making community-driven translations easy, I thought it had taken the next step to removing the barriers to entry - that I could skip the registration step entirely and focus on translating right away, and changes made by me (unregistered user) would be sent for approval to an admin before applying. I'm currently working on a software project where changes are submitted for approval before going public, so I made an (incorrect) analogy.

The workflow you suggest is indeed possible with Pootle, but we don't enforce it. Each language team is free to decide whether or not to enable anonymous suggestions for their locale. Either way, I guess we would need at least one person reviewing those suggestions for each language with anonymous suggestions enabled.

With your help, I understand now how Pootle's working. Thanks a lot. No, no enthusiasm were hurt during this incident :slight_smile: I'll wait for the current maintainer to respond within a reasonable amount of time, and I will offer him/her to work together (I cannot address him/her by name, as there's none specified).

I understand. If (s)he doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time, would you be willing to become the maintainer yourself?

I hope to be able to provide significant improvement over LibreOffice's current georgian localization. I guess many contributors didn't understand the key issues why LO has forked from OO, or preferred to stay with OO, so that may explain the current inactivity of our fellow contributors.

Can't say for sure, but I don't think anyone is maintaining Georgian OOo, at least it doesn't seem to be the case from looking at https://translate.apache.org/projects/OOo_34/. The problem is probably the lack of motivated manpower. :slight_smile:
By the way, I just discovered how you could contact a person who's marked as responsible for ka.libreoffice.org website. You can find his address here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/Web_Sites_services#International_Sites .

I'm glad people like you are working on LibreOffice. That's one of the main reasons why it's a great product.

Thank you! I'm glad I could be of help and I'm glad people like you are approaching us. Have a nice Sunday! :slight_smile:

Rimas

#4

23/09/2012 12:29, sgrìobh Rimas Kudelis:

I understand. If (s)he doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time, would you be willing to become the maintainer yourself?

Can't say for sure, but I don't think anyone is maintaining Georgian OOo, at least it doesn't seem to be the case from looking at https://translate.apache.org/projects/OOo_34/. The problem is probably the lack of motivated manpower. :slight_smile:
By the way, I just discovered how you could contact a person who's marked as responsible for ka.libreoffice.org website. You can find his address here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/Web_Sites_services#International_Sites .

I think we can at least make Luka co-admin. I contacted the old Georgian maintainers - also for Firefox, in case Luka would like to rescue another dormant project :slight_smile: - and got no response and it's been months now. I eventually found two people who are interested but due to a lack of time, they've so far only made small inroads into Firefox and nothing yet on LO.

I'll email Luka off-list and let him know who they are, so perhaps they can work out some collaboration but in any case, my suggestion is to make Luka co-admin right now.

Cheers

Michael

#5

2012.09.23 15:13, Michael Bauer wrote:

23/09/2012 12:29, sgrìobh Rimas Kudelis:

I understand. If (s)he doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time, would you be willing to become the maintainer yourself?

Can't say for sure, but I don't think anyone is maintaining Georgian OOo, at least it doesn't seem to be the case from looking at https://translate.apache.org/projects/OOo_34/. The problem is probably the lack of motivated manpower. :slight_smile:
By the way, I just discovered how you could contact a person who's marked as responsible for ka.libreoffice.org website. You can find his address here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/Web_Sites_services#International_Sites .

I think we can at least make Luka co-admin. I contacted the old Georgian maintainers - also for Firefox, in case Luka would like to rescue another dormant project :slight_smile: - and got no response and it's been months now. I eventually found two people who are interested but due to a lack of time, they've so far only made small inroads into Firefox and nothing yet on LO.

I'll email Luka off-list and let him know who they are, so perhaps they can work out some collaboration but in any case, my suggestion is to make Luka co-admin right now.

I fully agree, but I need Luka to register with Pootle and send us his username first. :wink:

Rimas

#6

Hi all,

my user name with Pootle is "kosmous"
I would like to be granted permission to start helping out with LibO
translations in Greek.
Could someone please provide ?
Thanks in advance

Constantine

#7

Hi Kostas,

We can enable this from the Greek L10n team. I have seen your account
at https://translations.documentfoundation.org/
and I have admin rights (with pkst, Kostas Papadimas).
At the moment you can make translation suggestions.

There is another person that also got registered at the above URL for
the Greek language.
Can you contact the Greek team at discuss@el.libreoffice.org so that
we can see what we can do get you both to translate for Greek;

See http://el.libreoffice.org/get-involved/ on how to subscribe to the
discuss@el.libreoffice.org mailing list.

Simos

#8

Hi,

2012.09.23 18:12, Rimas Kudelis wrote:

2012.09.23 15:13, Michael Bauer wrote:

I think we can at least make Luka co-admin. I contacted the old Georgian maintainers - also for Firefox, in case Luka would like to rescue another dormant project :slight_smile: - and got no response and it's been months now. I eventually found two people who are interested but due to a lack of time, they've so far only made small inroads into Firefox and nothing yet on LO.

I'll email Luka off-list and let him know who they are, so perhaps they can work out some collaboration but in any case, my suggestion is to make Luka co-admin right now.

I fully agree, but I need Luka to register with Pootle and send us his username first. :wink:

For the record, Luka's username is zero and he now has admin permissions on Georgian. It doesn't look like we would've had an active Georgian team lately so I won't wait much longer for the team lead to reply.

Rimas