[Mailman-i18n] [Mailman-Developers] Please Tell Me How You Translate

[Clytie Siddall]

On 13/07/2006, at 11:42 AM, Ace Suares wrote:

> On Tuesday 11 July 2006 08:48, Clytie Siddall wrote:
>
>> You might like to look at the Debian/Wordforge plans for a complete
>> translation infrastructure. [7]. I believe this is the future of  
>> i18n.
>
> Since I am using launchpad now, I am confronted with rosetta. What  
> do you
> think of rosetta vs wordforge?

In summary:

Rosetta is not free software, Wordforge is free software.

Rosetta has serious issues with access control and quality assurance  
which Wordforge does not.

Rosetta is designed to work with one distro, Ubuntu, where the  
Wordforge tools are designed to work in many different situations,  
online, offline, as a backend or frontend, interfacing with other  
translation tools and structures, whatever the upstream project chooses.

Rosetta is there, for Ubuntu users, so it's convenient. It doesn't  
work well outside Ubuntu, and has caused conflicts and a lot of  
wasted time for other projects. For example, the files on Rosetta are  
not current. You can sit down there for hours and translate a file  
which hasn't been translated before. You later find out that  
upstream, at the project which actually created that file, it has  
already been translated.

The authorative work for any project can only occur under its  
management, or via direct cooperation with it. Rosetta doesn't work  
with the upstream projects at all. People logging into Rosetta right  
now can be changing our Mailman translations, and we won't even know  
about it. Due to the lack of quality control, the translations in  
Rosetta are often of low quality, causing the upstream project to  
receive outraged emails and bug reports about files they had already  
quality-checked, but which have been altered in Rosetta!

Wordforge, for example Pootle, which is the online/offline  
translation interface, does not have any of these problems, and acts  
as an optional and carefully-coordinated part of upstream workflow.  
It's an excellent free-software project which supports the standards  
and works closely with any upstream project which chooses to use it.  
I recommend it.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN