Here are my thoughts about transifex.net as translation platform for maemo:

First: Very big thanks to all of you who had a look at transifex.net and helped with the evaluation. It was really cool to see so many tranlations pop up within the first 24 hours! Conboy is now translated into 11 languages! If we could to this for the complete maemo eco system it would be absolutely awesome

I think this thread showed, that we have many people who are interested in doing translations. For me it is especially nice to see a lot fresh blood here. Some of you just recently joined the community and I think translations are a nice way to get first experiences with contributing to an open source project. Therefore I think that having a low entry barrier for translator does not only benefit the software, but also the community because doing translations might just be the first step which someone makes in the maemo community.

For me the experience was mostly positive and I had the feeling that most of you didn´t had too much trouble as well. Of course it was not a complete smooth ride and there are definitively things that should be improved. I´ll try to make a list from what I´ve seen, but please also write your ideas and observations.

- We need integration with svn and git on garage. It was not nice, that the translators had to wait until I could manually upload the translations, before they got any feedback or updated statistics. This is already been worked on, so it´s here only for completeness.

- Creating a new translation should be as easy as clicking one button. Currently you have to upload a .po file which makes it unnecessary difficult as there are many things that can go wrong.
All information for creating a new .po file is available to transifex, including the author, time, date, project ID, etc. So this should be pretty straight forward.

- When uploading a .po file it gets checked, but if one of those checks fails there is no good error message what went wrong. The error message is for example to run "msgfmt -c" on the file. Transifex could do that for the user and report back the actual output of "msgfmt".

- As project admin I would like to get an email if someone wants to join the project.

- I would like to have the possibility to contact all translators who are working on the project. For example to send a message like: "I´ll do a new release on 2.12.2009, please try to get everything up to date until then."

- It would be nice if the name of the translator is automatically added to the header of the .po file. This would make it easier to track who did translations in the past.

- I would like a way to generate a list of all past and current translators to create a THANKS or CONTRIBUTERS file which I can ship with the current release.

- There should be an integration with the maemo karma system, so translators would get karma for doing translations.

- Once we have many maemo applications and translators on transifex.net we should probably have some kind of "team leaders", that lead language teams. This way if I receive a bug saying that the German translation is wrong I could assign this bug to the person in charge for German translations. He/she then could take care of this bug or give it to one of the team members.

- Integration with some discussion system (best would be talk.maemo.org). It just might happen that there is the need to communicate between translators and coders or between a translator and another translator. Like, for example, discussing about the context of a string or about dividing a big piece of work between several people, etc...

- It should not be possible to change the .pot file from the web interface.

- The project page shows a "maintainer" field which is a direct mailto:xxx@yyy link. That´s not really nice regarding spam.


There is probably more, so please join the discussion!