SignOffOnTranslation

Summary

Make a system that allows a translator to sign-off on translation suggestions. This is meant as a way for a translator to consolidate the effort of many translators, so that feedback can be provided to a single person. This will improve the possibility for translators to adopt a good proofreading work flow and improve the efficiency of such a work flow.

Release Note

This change will allow translators on LaunchPad to make a complete update suggestions for all the missing translations in a package, either by making the new suggestions or by signing-off on the existing ones. This will allow for better proofreading work flows.

Rationale

The current workflow for translations in LaunchPad is this. A translator, which can be any user current logged into LaunchPad makes a suggestions for a translation. After that a member of the translation team decides whether it should go in or not. The problem is, what if the suggestion, for various reasons, is not good enough to go in. Then you are left with the following not so good options:

  • 1 You can leave the string untranslated, in which case the time you have spent proofreading that string will be lost. And furthermore the translator will not get any better[1] 2 You simply correct the string, in which case you end up using way to much time on it and the advantage of sharing the workload decrease and the translator will not get any better[1]

3) You give the translator proofreading feedback and let him make a better suggestion. This removes all the disadvantages in [1]. BUT if the translation have 5+ contributers that means keeping track of that many sets of feedback and sending that many e-mails afterwards, of which you may never get a reply because that may be way more effort than this translator ever wanted to contribute.

These are not optimal solutions. This situation can be solved in two ways:

  • 1 Provide a feedback feature in rosetta, a feature that I know is planned for, but as far as I understand, not in the near future. This will allow us to give feedback, to learn the translator to give better suggestions, but will not remove or lower the possibility of doing so in vain. 2 Allow a translator to sign-off on a translation[2]. This will allow for feedback and since this will require the translator to learn about the workflow, she is probably also more likely to be committed enough to respond to the feedback.

[1] Meaning that if the reason you reject it is a matter of convention, then this translator will never learn that convention and you can keep rejecting strings from this particular translator.

[2] Note that this specification is not meant as a voting system, but merely a way for a volunteer to say "I have now made suggestions for all the remaining strings in this translation, either by making my own or by signing-off on somebody elses, and I am now ready for proofreading feedback.

Use Cases

See rationale section.

Assumptions

Design

Implementation

Giving anybody the possibility to sign-off on a translations and to do that on as many as they want to, might cause a large increase in databases demnads. This could be alleviated by implementing on a per user basis, so that any given user could only sign-off on translations in a finite number of packages.

UI Changes

This will require an extra button per string in the translations UI with the "Sign-off on this translation"-text and next to the name of the person that have translated a string could be link (in the form of text or an icon) to a page that shows who has signed-off on it, the last part could also be a mouse over.

Code Changes

Besides that actual code to add this functionality (which I don't know what will include) it will also involve changing the existing code so that when looking at all the suggestions per user per package that should obviously also include the one she hsa signed-off on.

Migration

Test/Demo Plan

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

SignOffOnTranslation (last edited 2009-02-01 00:55:03 by 0x4dd7558e)