Oh, and I really want to give thanks to some people in particular. First to Cristobal for his generous efforts in bringing up the Pootle service. Even though it didn't work out, it was a great experiment and I appreciate everything you did for us. Clytie too for pushing so hard on use an open source solution for this part of Mailman's development (and I'd like to think, the helpful nudges on Launchpad to DTRT in open sourcing). I'd also like to thank Danilo for patiently explaining Launchpad's translation service to me. All errors are mine. And once again, my thanks to /everyone/ who translates Mailman. I'm a hopeless monolinguist, but I absolutely love that this humble project is so well translated and has blazed some trails in internationalizing Python projects. I remember when Tokio sent the first patches to display Mailman in Japanese. I was at a Python conference sitting next to Ka-Ping Yee, hacking away on my laptop. I got the interface up and although it looked pretty, I couldn't understand a word of it. Ka-Ping was shoulder surfing and was pleasantly surprised to see, and confirm, the Japanese web page. How cool was that?! So everyone, thanks, and I hope Launchpad will make your lives much easier. As always, please provide me with feedback and I'll make sure it gets to Danilo and his team. -Barry

Hi Barry, 2009/8/31 Barry Warsaw :

I am CC'ing Danilo Segan (Launchpad translations team lead) on this message.  Danilo, please correct any misconceptions I have about Launchpad translations, or provide any other comments that you think would help us in this transition.

On Jul 21, 2009, at 6:20 AM, David Planella wrote:

...

Hi Barry and all,

Hi David,

...

If the final decision is to use Launchpad for translations as well, I'd suggest to publish all branches for translations (2.1, 2.2 and 3.0), clearly indicating the status of each version (e.g. development focus, future development, maintenance-only) in the description of the translation template. The (relatively) new feature [1] [2] of automatically uploading new translation templates upon commit on a bzr branch would certainly make this easier. Message sharing between branches is also an interesting feature not yet widely announced but already in use. It effectively allows translations to be automatically shared across branches, which for translators means that they only have to translate in one branch and those translations with identical msgids will be instantly translated in the other branches.

I've now done this.  I've registered the 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0 branches as the translation branches for Mailman series of the same names.

Great!

However, I am thinking about splitting out the catalogs and .po files into a separate branch, at least for MM3 because I'd like to distribute them as a separate plugin.  If/when I get around to that I'll fiddle with the translation branches.

Ok. Another question, slightly out of topic but also related to reorganizing translations: has there been any work in moving the HTML templates' translations to PO files? Or are the templates going to be handled in any different way for 3.0? This would make life a lot easier for translators (perhaps just using xml2po to convert back and forth would be useful).

I'm not actually sure how useful it is to have a translation branch for 2.1.

IIRC 2.1 is the maintenance branch, and releases in that branch also include translation updates. With message sharing, any fixes translators do in 2.2 or 3.0 (for identical strings) would automatically go to 2.1 as well, so I think this might be a valid use case.

Note that I did /not/ upload all the .po files.  I think the legal clearance for the 2.1 translations is sketchy in places.  I want to clear this up, definitely for 3.0 if not also for 2.2.  I think to do this correctly will require starting from scratch and using Launchpad permissions to control who can approve and upload translations for 2.2.

Who can approve and upload translations can only be handled by each translation team, but it basically boils down to the points you already outlined in the last message, here summarised and translated to "LP Translations jargon" ;) : * Translation teams will only be appointed (by the Mailman project maintainers) to the "GNU Mailman translators" translation group as translators for their language if they have disclaimed copyright to the FSF. * Translation team leaders should only allow new members joining the team if they have also disclaimed copyright. * Only translation team members of those teams in the "GNU Mailman translators" translation group will be able to submit (as opposed to suggest) and approve translations.

 I know it's a shame to lose all of our 2.1 translations, but I'm confident we can leverage the community to help us out.

In which way is the legal clearance for 2.1 sketchy? Can community members who've made the translations not upload the current 2.1 translations themselves?

Launchpad supports sharing translations, which is awesome, but I think will probably not help us much since 2.2 still uses %-strings but 3.0 uses $-strings.  However, if we're not able to use the 2.1 translations, perhaps Mark can consider switching to $-strings for Mailman 2.2 also.

Message sharing will still be useful for those strings not using variables, but if the MM2.2 template could be migrated to using $-strings, that would obviously be the best scenario and would allow using the full potential of message sharing.

...

Then again, I feel I must warn that I might be a bit biased, since I also work for Canonical as the Ubuntu Translations Coordinator :-).

Danilo has set up a translation group for Mailman translators.  We'll need to set up individual language teams inside Launchpad specifically for the Mailman project.  Danilo has told me that while there's a GNU Translations group in Launchpad, it's not very active.  Their names will be of the form mailman-l10n-xx where xx is the language code. As David implies, there's already a mailman-l10n-ca for Catalan which he owns, so perhaps we can use that as a guinea pig.  We need to add that team to the Mailman Translation group, but we have to be careful about its membership and permissions.

Feel free to use us (the mailman-l10n-ca team) as a guinea pig :-) to appoint us as the translation team for Catalan in the "GNU Mailman translators" translation group. We're a moderated team and both Jordi and I signed the FSF copyright disclaimer [1]

As I understand it, the proper legal framework for translations should be:

* Every person who joins a mailman translation team should officially disclaim copyright with the Free Software Foundation.  I will help coordinate that effort.

* We need the individual translation teams to restrict membership to ensure that its members have signed the disclaimer form.  The team owners will be the gatekeepers so it's up to me to make sure the team owners understand their responsibility before adding the team to the Mailman translation group.

* Once we get disclaimer forms, we can accept that contributor's translations.

It sounds good to me, but I'm not a legal expert. Perhaps Danilo might have something to add.

...

...

If there are concerns, questions, or complaints about Launchpad's translation services, feel free to bring that up here or in the Launchpad public forums.  I'll answer as best I can or find an expert on that part of the system.  From my perspective, it would be nice to re-integrate this part of the development/release cycle.

Or on IRC for those who prefer it: #launchpad on Freenode. I'm usually there (dpm) but most importantly the Launchpad Translations developers are also there, and we're always glad to help with any questions or requests.

David, Danilo, let me know if the above makes sense.  If you have anything to add either technically, legally, or logistically, please let us know.

It makes sense to me. I hope my comments can help as well.

I plan on updating http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Internationalization with all the new workflow once it's settled.

Yes, I think that's also quite important.

Thanks everyone, -Barry

Thank you for moving this forward, I'm sure translators will be pleased! Regards, David. [1] http://translationproject.org/team/ca.html

Hi guys :) <waves> I've reappeared out of the brain fog [1] and need to catch up on Mailman translation. Although I'm delighted that Launchpad has finally moved to open source, I still have some reservations about using it. I'd personally prefer to use Pootle, or grab the latest file from bzr. However, the use of Launchpad means, especially with my intermittent capabilities, that I need to be able to check if anyone else has started contributing Vietnamese strings to Mailman. It's important that translators don't duplicate work, and that can happen, say, with one translating offline, and one using Launchpad. Does Launchpad have an upload function with overwrite or merge options, like Pootle? If not, can we just commit translations via bzr, and they will be merged with the Launchpad files? Meanwhile, I'll grab the latest vi.po from bzr and update it. :) from Clytie Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team [1] http://www.hfme.org/

David, thanks for your detailed reply (below). :) I'm glad to hear that Launchpad has caught up with Pootle in the access management area. That's certainly reassuring, as security and quality assurance have been major issues in the past. I hope I will have time to manage the Launchpad translation team for my language. I'll try to get back to it. Meanwhile, I've just updated the Mailman 2.2 branch Vietnamese translation (messages and templates) via bzr. Please take this as the current translation. The messages file for Vietnamese in Mailman 3.0 branch doesn't seem to have been updated: is this still the development branch? Sorry I'm not up-to-date with the list mails: I haven't been able to read email over the past several months, and I don't know how many capable days I will have in this "clear patch", so I'm focussing first on updating as many of my translation project files as possible. If I am still able to read/write after that, I hope to catch up with the mailing lists and other contributions (like our i18n wiki pages [1] ). :) Clytie [1] I've also just updated the i18n howto wiki page with bzr details (replacing SVN), and mentioning the move to Launchpad. (previous message quoted below due to length and useful details) On 30/09/2009, at 5:08 PM, David Planella wrote:

Hi Clytie,

2009/9/30 Clytie Siddall :

...

Hi guys :)

<waves>

I've reappeared out of the brain fog [1] and need to catch up on Mailman translation.

Welcome back :-)

...

Although I'm delighted that Launchpad has finally moved to open source, I still have some reservations about using it. I'd personally prefer to use Pootle, or grab the latest file from bzr.

However, the use of Launchpad means, especially with my intermittent capabilities, that I need to be able to check if anyone else has started contributing Vietnamese strings to Mailman. It's important that translators don't duplicate work, and that can happen, say, with one translating offline, and one using Launchpad.

Launchpad allows controling who uploads and submits translations through a permissions system similar to Pootle, but with a slightly different implementation.

As mentioned in the previous e-mails, translation groups [1] and translation teams [2] [3] are the basis of this system. In the case of Mailman, there is a Mailman Translators group already:

https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/mailman-translators

This group will be a "container" for translation teams appointed by the Mailman developers to translate Mailman in each particular language. As such, I'm probably guessing you'll be both the owner (in Launchpad jargon, basically the one who created the group) and a member of the Vietnamese team. This will allow you to choose a subscription policy for the team and control who can join and submit translations.

Regarding duplicate work, it all boils down to who has permission to submit translations (i.e. the team's policy and who is a member of a team) and the communication within the team. As you see, it's not much different than other open source translation projects.

The only big difference is that Launchpad tries to lower the entry barrier to contributors and encourage a collaborative translation effort by allowing anyone with a Launchpad account to submit translation suggestions. These suggestions will not be used until a translation team member with permissions reviews them and either discards or accepts them.

...

Does Launchpad have an upload function with overwrite or merge options, like Pootle?

Yes. You can either translate online or upload files also through the web UI. When uploading, you can choose to overwrite all strings which changed in your PO file or simply add those for which there was no translations.

Here you can see how you can upload files in Launchpad, taking the Transmission project as an example:

https://translations.launchpad.net/transmission/trunk/+pots/transmission/vi/...

(Of course, that's just the URL, you can navigate to that location through the UI)

...

If not, can we just commit translations via bzr, and they will be merged with the Launchpad files?

Yes, this is also possible (http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/import-translations-from-bazaar-branc... ), but it has to be enabled in the project settings.

...

Meanwhile, I'll grab the latest vi.po from bzr and update it. :)

from Clytie

Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team

[1] http://www.hfme.org/

I hope this info helped.

Regards, David.

[1] https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/YourProject/ChoosingAGroup [2] https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/JoiningATranslationGroup [3] https://help.launchpad.net/Teams/CreatingAndRunning _______________________________________________ Mailman-i18n mailing list Posts: Mailman-i18n@python.org Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-i18n/clytie%40riverland.net.a...