Google Summer of Code

[Mark Doliner]

2009/3/28 Robson Mendonça <robsonmwoc at gmail.com>:
> I'm reading the im.pidgin.www source code and it is very simple.
>
> My proposal is to make a web interface to make translation. I thought
> something like a "translate in place".
>
> For exemple, if you are a brazilian visitor, the site will try to get
> translation, but if it doesn't exists, each paragraph in the page is marked
> as translatable. With some buttons to make a suggestion of translation.
>
> After this the community can make the evaluation to aprove the sentence
> translated. And when the translation of all page is done and aproved, the
> website loads the translated version.
>
> We can use the same machanism to make translation of .po files, and in the
> end of process generate the final files to distribution.

Yes this idea is very reasonable.  I agree it makes sense to translate
Pidgin and our website using the same mechanism.  And Pidgin should of
course definitely continue to use .po files.  I'm not sure it's
necessary to "translate in place."  My personal preference would be to
keep things as simple as possible, and I think the simplest solution
might be for the website text to be put into .po files, and for
translators to translate that text as they would any other text.

But I think it is important to ask our translators how they feel about
this.  Would they be interested in translating our web site?  Have
they translated other web sites before?  Would would be their ideal
solution?

Personally I do like the idea of translating things via a web
interface.  And I also think an approval mechanism is important.  But
I'm not convinced that writing our own is a good idea.  I think it
would be better to use existing technology such as Launchpad[1], the
Gnome Translation Project[2], or Pootle[3]

> I have a question about the team preference about the technology involved
> with Pidgin.im. Do you prefers make a software integrated with Trac? Or a
> isolated solution, integrated with website only? Or both?. This is very
> important because most of the content is located in the Trac wiki, and there
> are a crossover of navigation and information between them.

I think this project should probably focus on translating only
pidgin.im and a few strings on planet.pidgin.im (but probably not the
news entries), and not developer.pidgin.im.  It doesn't seem like Trac
supports localizing wiki content right now[4], and I don't think it
makes sense for the Pidgin project to be the mentor organization for
making a change that large to Trac.

[1] https://launchpad.net/
[2] http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject
[3] http://translate.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/1513

-Mark