Done .

Yup. I believe the systems used by SciTe & Co are vastly easier for everyone involved, and if they work for those apps, they should work for Conboy.

Heck, in the time Conny spent trying to make Transifex work, he could have cobbled together a similar hack, and we'd be done :-)

What's the deal with the ~ thingies? The are in the dutch version for the main branch.

#~ msgid "On startup"
#~ msgstr "Bij het opstarten"

GRTX Daniel

Those refer to stings that have been removed from the program code. You can leave them in the file in case I reintroduce them later again, but generally just ignore them.

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!

So if no one has to add anything to this list, I'll contact the transifex.net team soon and and then what they think about it.

If you need a Danish translation - add me to the project.
Signed as Lycanthropy on the webpage.

Thanks Your're added. I think the current unstable version has Danish translations, but the stable version not yet. Just have a look at the project page, it should tell you the details.

First off, let me take this chance to say a big THANKS to Conny for stepping
forward and leading this effort.

Like any vibrant community, we've got a large and vibrant translators group.
Seeing fresh blood was very promising and encouraging! Our bet is to offer
all the necessary tools and processes to bloom and ship Maemo to places where
today isn't possible.

Having said that, let's go on and see how we can improve Maemo and Tx.


Fixed issues

- Integration with svn on garage: [ FIXED ]
Sample commit: http://ow.ly/AuCu
Will go live in the next days.

- Integration with gitorious: [ FIXED ]
Just add 'transifex' as a committer to your repo.
Sample commit: http://ow.ly/AuIv

- Notifications to project maintainers on permission request: [ FIXED ]
Will go live in the next days.

- Disable editng of the POT file [ FIXED ]
Your file filter (regex) is now updated to enable access only to PO files.
We could, of course, create an Advanced config option for maintainers to
choose to exclude POT files from their projects, regardless of the filter.

- Obfuscate email addresses in templates: [ FIXED ]
Email addresses are obfuscated in the template, but usable from browsers with
javascript enabled. Use 'View Source' to check it out.


Open tickets

- Create new translation with 1 click:
http://transifex.org/ticket/399

- Per-Language Team Coordinators:
http://transifex.org/ticket/323

- Discussion system:
http://transifex.org/ticket/121

We are working on something minimal. The goal is to allow translators to
work together without *requiring* them to have a mailing list. Would love to
collect some more requirements and turn them into features.


Other issues

The following issues could be solved, if we believe they are important.

- Integration with git on garage
Transifex supports git+ssh for pushing, which isn't available on garage.
We'll need to either enable this on garage or find a way to make git over
https work in Tx.

- Send announcements to all translators for a project.

- Automatically add the translator to the header of the .po file.

- Generate a list of all past and current translators (THANKS file).

- Integration with the maemo karma system

> 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.

Indeed. This is fixed if a maintainer chooses to push submissions directly to his VCS as commits.

To give some context: Transifex supports both pushing directly to a VCS,
but also submitting translations via email to the maintainers. In the latter
case, the maintainer needs to commit it, and then Tx detects the change and
updates the statistics.

> 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".

Unfortunately msgfmt's error messages are pretty bad. We started developing some
checks on top of polib, not really sure how those will turn out though..

Thank you Dimitris for you´re work on transifex and for directly replying here

Great stuff, thanks a lot!

Thanks, this was actually suggested in the thread, but I did forget to try it. Maybe it would be enough to make the help text of this option a bit more verbose.

Ok, you completely tricked me with that

Thanks for those tickets!

Yes, it probably should not be a big complex system. Having some discussion readable for everyone directly on the project could help. E.g., I explain to one translator the meaning or context of a special phrase and all other translators get the same information.

I´ll ask around, maybe it can be added to garage.

That could probably be done with the minimalistic discussion support?!

Well, I like those, but I also suggested them, so we probably need some other opinions here...

Thanks a lot for your quick reply! Hopefully we get things moving soon!