Comments on: making translations easier for everyone

By: Dimitris Glezos » Weblog » Transifex

Dimitris Glezos » Weblog » Transifex — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:55:57 +0000

[...] Update 29/6: Chris Blizzard has written a more fluent and elaborate description of the goals of Transifex. [...]

By: pabs

pabs — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:50:24 +0000

How does this differ from pootle?

By: Danilo

Danilo — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 07:37:21 +0000

It should be noted that Damned Lies (in GNOME SVN, “damned-lies”) has supported multiple VCSes from early on (but only CVS and Subversion until Dimitris added support for git and mercurial).

This has meant that we were able to provide translation statistics for modules outside “core” GNOME, such as those on http://l10n.gnome.org/releases/freedesktop.org

By: Dimitris Glezos

Dimitris Glezos — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:27:49 +0000

The difference of Transifex from Rosetta (besides that the first is free software) is that the contributions are done directly in the repositories of the original projects. In Rosetta, translations are copied downstream (eg. in Ubuntu) and translators are given an interface to contribute to the copied versions, not the original ones directly. The downside is that all other projects except Ubuntu are not benefited from the contributions. AFAIK, there is no automatic way to merge translations upstream, and language maintainers rarely do it (probably due to the difficulties every merge process has).

With Transifex, by submitting translations directly to the original project, all downstream projects (including Ubuntu) are directly and immediately benefited from each submission. Instead of having a project reaching out to various translators, Transifex’s design has in its center a community of translators reaching out to various projects.

By: Karsten Wade

Karsten Wade — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:20:02 +0000

Unless I misunderstad, Rosetta (and other parts of Launchpad) are not free/libre open source software.

Something Blizzard didn’t include in his post is about the platform being used, and it speaks directly to your question. The solution Dimitris is working is built on Damned Lies, the WebUI translation system that GNOME developed. He is working with GNOME to get any changes included in the upstream version.

So, not only does the interface use Transifex to provide upstream translations seamlessly, but it is integrated into another upstream system. No one is locked in to using, for example, Fedora’s interface. Anyone can get the same code and put up their own instance of Damned Lies + Transifex.

So, again, this is more of the Fedora Way. Fedora is willing to do it all, but if that is not good enough for someone, the code is there to do it themselves.

By: daniels

daniels — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:10:57 +0000

Serious question: how does it differ from Rosetta?