We had a BOF on translation issues on this year’s Akademy. Many people came up and we really didn’t have time to discuss everything. However, it was a very interesting meeting and a needed one. Sebastien made a summary on the translators’s list: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=137413658517601&w=2
The common reservation system
The Google Summer of Code work is on the way. Up to this point different teams developed different solutions to handle the management of their teams, like the translation reservation. The GSoC work is going to provide a common tool. We were discussing mostly the details like authentication for translators and new people. The general agreement was that we’re going to try the new methods. The functionality will be optional and each team will decide if they’re going to use it or not.
Wiki translation workflow
Currently the wiki translations are somewhat apart from the main translation work. There is no information to the translation team if somebody joins the wiki translation, there is no automatic notification of the changes either. Most of the teams expressed concerns on the wiki translation quality and prefer the wiki translations to be linked more to the general ones.
Reporting a typo
It was a surprise to me to learn that most of the teams have problems getting user feedback, like typo reports. The Bugzilla system is not working well for such cases.
In the Polish translation we have a note to the user about this in the “About translations” window. It says to send a typo/clarification request to a mailing list. It was there since long ago and seems to work quite well.
We came with an idea to add a new window next/in the “Report a bug” one that allows to contact the translation team. I find it a good idea and it looks that it is also OK for kdelibs.
What we did not have time to discuss…
After my Akademy presentation, many translators told me that they also have a need for more promotion efforts. We did not have time to discuss it at the BoF, but we’ll use the mailing list for that.
