making translations easier for everyone

Demitris Glezos has been doing some awesome work on the new Fedora Translation site. Unlike a lot of translation projects, where the focus has been on improving that one project (KDE, GNOME, Ubuntu, whatever) his approach has been different. In addition to supporting the packages which have lived with Red Hat + Fedora in the past (anaconda, rhgb, etc) he’s also added support so that you can pull translation information from external repositories as well. For example the OLPC Sugar Interface is hosted on laptop.org and RPM is hosted on rpm.org. Each of those projects are hosted with different revision control systems, but he hides that information to make things easier for translators. With an easy to download translation file for each project, it brings translators and upstream projects closer together and it’s a good first step as a service to upstream projects.

But now he’s taken it to the next level with Transifex. Here’s how it works. You’re a small project and you’re hosted somewhere. You want translators. Very often you have to build your own community by attracting people, setting up accounts, etc. This isn’t a problem for the larger projects like GNOME and KDE which have their own communities, but it’s harder for smaller projects. With Transifex what Dimitris has done is set it up so that a Fedora translator can, via the Fedora site, have new translations checked into the upstream project. This is done through a single “fedora” account that the project has set up and checkins through that account will contain account information about who checked it in and how to contact that person. He’s setting it up so that it will support the most common revision control systems (git, cvs, svn, hg) and it should be seamless from the standpoint of the upstream projects and the translators.

While I’m sure that a lot of projects won’t want to use this service, it’s likely to be very useful to a lot of people. And what I love about it is that it fits so well into the Fedora Way: it vastly improves the lives of both translators and upstream projects in a way that grows the entire pie for everyone. Connecting the hundreds of translators who are active in Fedora with the thousands of projects out there with a very low barrier to entry solution.

Great job, Dimitris!