Transfering HELP from AOO to LO

l10n
#1

Hello all,

I joined HR team few years ago, but only after LO splitted from OO.
We kept UI translation up to date, but never even tried to translate HELP since it's massive task with over 400.000 words.
Too much for team of two people working in their free time.

Today I was checking AOO webpage and was searching to see if someone has joined their HR team and started translating AOO into croatian (or to be more precise, just getting it to 100% since it was 100% before split).
Then I noticed HELP project there is at 91%!!!
https://translate.apache.org/hr/

Is there a way to copy same, translated strings from there into our Pootle???
There are differences now, but not that much. If with transfering strings we can get to 70%, it's better then todays little over 9%.

I guess when LO forked, it forgot to fork our help files also. :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Mihovil

#2

I see that there are not so many files in Help. The easiest way would be to grap the AOO files, open one in Virtaal which puts the strings into its translation memory. The open the corresponding file for LO and it will help you match the strings. It would also allow you to do a gross error check.

That's what I would do because AOO had a Help file for our locale which was x% complete but actually was full of bad strings.

Michael

23/08/2014 11:33, sgrìobh Mihovil Stanic:

#3

Good point, I just had a look, the Croatian Help file just has English pasted into the translation, for example
https://translate.apache.org/hr/aoo40help/translate/helpcontent2/source/text/scalc.po
Welcome to the $[officename] Calc Help

There is a tiny number of translations, mostly one-word strings
Menus
Izbornici

But on the whole, nothing worth recycling to be honest.

Michael

23/08/2014 18:52, sgrìobh Milos Sramek:

#4

Yes, you are right.
most of strings are english strings.
Well, I got my hopes up...

23.8.2014. u 20:07, Michael Bauer je napisao/la:

#5

What can we do to recruit more people to help with translations?

- Would it be helpful to have a sign at the LibreOffice booth at
conferences and LinuxFests?

- Have we tried recruiting students from Universities (e.g. from Linux
User Groups, etc..) ?

Best,
--R

#6

For me (an occasional translator) the biggest hurdle is the technical
overhead needed for some of the translations. Somebody like me, who just
wants to translate a page or correct some errors - being forced to learn
pootle (or similar tools) prevents me from "just starting".

Therefore in my eyes, a simpler workflow could substantially improve
crowd-sourcing of help file translations / corrections. Example:
- present an "edit" or "translate" button on every page or even paragraph
(could / should? be restricted to registered users)
- transmit the diff of such a user-made change to a group of reviewers with
"publish" rights
- make it easy to integrate the changes back into the original page (e.g.
by buttons "accept" / "edit" / "dismiss" (if spam etc)
- make history visible (e.g. like in Wikis) so that everybody can see, who
has contributed what

... well, that's just a proposal that came into my mind while reading your
question. Easy to request but heavy to implement, I suppose :wink:

Nino

#7

What can we do to recruit more people to help with translations?

For me (an occasional translator) the biggest hurdle is the technical
overhead needed for some of the translations. Somebody like me, who just
wants to translate a page or correct some errors - being forced to learn
pootle (or similar tools) prevents me from "just starting".

I haven't really used pootle much, but it does seem a bit quirky.

There are a number of things we could do to improve translations. To
hop over to another piece of infra for a moment, getting the
Translations extension installed on the TDF wiki will hopefully be a
good step forward:
https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/107

Therefore in my eyes, a simpler workflow could substantially improve
crowd-sourcing of help file translations / corrections. Example:
- present an "edit" or "translate" button on every page or even paragraph
(could / should? be restricted to registered users)

Restricting edits to logged-in users is a good approach to
spam/griefers, even if the content is reviewed before inclusion.

- transmit the diff of such a user-made change to a group of reviewers with
"publish" rights
- make it easy to integrate the changes back into the original page (e.g.
by buttons "accept" / "edit" / "dismiss" (if spam etc)
- make history visible (e.g. like in Wikis) so that everybody can see, who
has contributed what

These all seem like they could be helpful improvements to Pootle. Some
of them (e.g. making history visible) seem like they might not take a
ton of development work. Does the Language team chat with the Pootle
developers at all? Are they receptive to suggestions/enhancement
requests?

... well, that's just a proposal that came into my mind while reading your
question. Easy to request but heavy to implement, I suppose :wink:

Some things might take more work, such as adding in a completely new
review system, but others might be more straightforward.

Once the Translations extension is installed in MediaWiki, it would be
great if you could give some feedback about the way that it works. I
believe that it integrates a number of features you mentioned
including history and a mechanism for review. I'm not suggesting that
MediaWiki could replace Pootle, but perhaps one tool might help to
inform and improve another.

Best,
--R

#8

Looks like someone has had the same idea:
https://github.com/translate/pootle/issues/1549

:slight_smile:

Cheers,
--R

#9

Hi all,

What can we do to recruit more people to help with translations?

For me (an occasional translator) the biggest hurdle is the technical
overhead needed for some of the translations. Somebody like me, who just
wants to translate a page or correct some errors - being forced to learn
pootle (or similar tools) prevents me from "just starting".

I haven't really used pootle much, but it does seem a bit quirky.

There are a number of things we could do to improve translations. To
hop over to another piece of infra for a moment, getting the
Translations extension installed on the TDF wiki will hopefully be a
good step forward:
https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/107

Moggi and Kendy are working on finding a way to correctly extract the
help files to transfer them to the wiki. But that's not all, after that
we need to find a workflow that do not cause more work to the l10n team
and in the same time allow more English native speakers to participate
to the help writing process.

Therefore in my eyes, a simpler workflow could substantially improve
crowd-sourcing of help file translations / corrections. Example:
- present an "edit" or "translate" button on every page or even paragraph
(could / should? be restricted to registered users)

Restricting edits to logged-in users is a good approach to
spam/griefers, even if the content is reviewed before inclusion.

it's more to prevent to add more work to translators.

- transmit the diff of such a user-made change to a group of reviewers with
"publish" rights
- make it easy to integrate the changes back into the original page (e.g.
by buttons "accept" / "edit" / "dismiss" (if spam etc)
- make history visible (e.g. like in Wikis) so that everybody can see, who
has contributed what

These all seem like they could be helpful improvements to Pootle. Some
of them (e.g. making history visible) seem like they might not take a
ton of development work. Does the Language team chat with the Pootle
developers at all? Are they receptive to suggestions/enhancement
requests?

Yes, we are in contact with Dwayne, there is several enhancement that
are in the pipe, like a new Pootle version, adding Deckhard, etc...

... well, that's just a proposal that came into my mind while reading your
question. Easy to request but heavy to implement, I suppose :wink:

Some things might take more work, such as adding in a completely new
review system, but others might be more straightforward.

Once the Translations extension is installed in MediaWiki, it would be
great if you could give some feedback about the way that it works. I
believe that it integrates a number of features you mentioned
including history and a mechanism for review. I'm not suggesting that
MediaWiki could replace Pootle, but perhaps one tool might help to
inform and improve another.

We will have a staging period once the technical issues solved, that
will help to define the process between help writers and l10n team. I
hope we will be able to discuss that next week.

Cheers
Sophie

#10

Hi Nino, *,

wants to translate a page or correct some errors - being forced to learn
pootle (or similar tools) prevents me from "just starting".

How is visiting a website, using search to find the string you want to
change, just change it and submit for review a big learning step? How could
pootle be easier to use?

Pootle surely is not used when you start from scratch. For that, you would
download the po files from pootle and translate offline. But similarly
finding that download and upload functionality is not hard either, or is it?

There needs to be some kind of back end, to allow for permissions, user
groups and stuff.

Therefore in my eyes, a simpler workflow could substantially improve
crowd-sourcing of help file translations / corrections. Example:
- present an "edit" or "translate" button on every page or even paragraph

Linking that to pootle probably is not too hard, if the concept of the
string ids stays the same..

With that, you would get the rest as well "for free"

Ciao
Christian

#11

Pootle is very non-tech user frendly and you shouldn't have problems translating with it.

You should try to translate for Mozilla via HG where workflow is something like this:
- learn using HG via command line or via Tortoise HG on windows
- get keys from mozilla
- login with key and password
- download/merge whole repository every time you want to translate
- check "Compare locales" tool and MANUALY copy string differences from EN_US to your locale
- translate
- commit changes
- merge changes to HG repository

With Pootle, you only log in and translate. :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Mihovil

1.9.2014 u 8:18, Christian Lohmaier je napisao/la:

#12

Hi,

2014.09.01 09:42, Mihovil Stanic wrote:

Pootle is very non-tech user frendly and you shouldn't have problems
translating with it.

You should try to translate for Mozilla via HG where workflow is
something like this:
- learn using HG via command line or via Tortoise HG on windows
- get keys from mozilla
- login with key and password
- download/merge whole repository every time you want to translate
- check "Compare locales" tool and MANUALY copy string differences
from EN_US to your locale
- translate
- commit changes
- merge changes to HG repository

With Pootle, you only log in and translate. :slight_smile:

not that it's very relevant here, but just to let you know, you can
actually translate Firefox and Thunderbird in Pootle as well. I migrated
most of my Mozilla work to Pootle just a few weeks ago. There were some
migration-related bumps, but I'm gonna see how it goes from here.

Rimas

#13

Thanks for heads up, but I'm on Pootle since last Mozilla summit, so almost a year now. :slight_smile:

I was describing my workflow before Pootle, just to point our how easy is to translate with tool like that.

Best regards,
Mihovil

1.9.2014. u 20:22, Rimas Kudelis je napisao/la:

#14

One of Pootle shortcomings in my experience is lack of changes tracking.

I don't see Pootle as techi tool. If you know how to log into facebook and post comment, you know how to translate on Pootle.
But problem is, new people don't know what they did good and what wasn't good.

For example, when you get new team member, you don't give him write permission, only permission to suggest.
He makes 50 string suggestions, and I go trough all of them accepting, refusing and editing mistakes.
But when I'm done, he can't possibly know what I accepted or corrected.

My first translation was Mozilla Thunderbird, and my mentor was long time Firefox translator.
HG was terrible, terrible tool for translating, but one of it strong points was change tracking.
I learned what I did wrong and how to improve my translations from that same change tracking system.
Sometime I even corrected mentor, everyone makes mistakes. :slight_smile:

I miss something like that in Pootle, to provide new people way to see their mistakes and improve their skills with that.

Best regards,
Mihovil

2.9.2014 u 10:26, Tom Davies je napisao/la:

#15

Hi :slight_smile:
2 separate issues;

1.
Wrt recruiting new people there is a constant source of potential new
people on the various Users Support mailing lists.

Most have arrived there to get answers to 1 or 2 questions and were toooo
focused and/or confused to notice any of "the other stuff" that goes on,
such as different mailing-lists for different teams. Often people on those
mailing lists have no idea how to get involved. They are often surprised
to learn that they can join other teams just as 'easily' as they joined the
Users Support mailing list and that the instructions on how to do so were
right at the beginning of their trek to join the Users Support mailing
lists.

I think mentioning, about once per month (or maybe fortnightly but not too
often)) the L10n mailing list and maybe your specific language mailing
lists on your User Support mailing-lists might attract some good people.

2.
As far as native English speakers go, the people in their current
Documentation Team's mailing list are not very technically minded and had a
big struggle trying to understand how to edit wiki's. Anything more
complex, even Pootle, would be a major blocker for them. They all use
ODFAuthors. So, anyone new only gets help as long as they are trying to
use ODFAuthors too.

I try to help people understand how to do wiki-editing but i am a hugely
unpopular maverick there. People generally don't join these teams to
instantly find themselves embroiled in a fight = they just want to get on
with doing something useful. So new people joining their team either also
avoid me and wiki-editing or drop-out. The English Faq has been mostly
done by Sophie and Alex (who seem to be in all teams and have tons of
energy) or by people who are nothing to do with the English Docs Team. The
English-speakers Documentation Team can only cope with doing the Published
Guides.

So,
1. I think you might be able to recruit more people from the User Support
mailing lists but don't spam them with adverts and requests too much or too
often! There are other places such as social media and all the usual good
places to market stuff but the User Support mailing lists are an extra
place that might be fruitful.

2. If you want native English speakers then you might have to think how to
attract people who are not already in the English-speakers Documentation
Team.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: