Pootle

Olpcboxes Contact: Alfonsodg —Rafael Ortiz, Xavi

Here's a report of trying to document the ups & downs of installing Pootle.

Scenarios

Opportunistic translator

This user just wants to help. S/he doesn't want to get tangled in the administrative tasks. The only possible collaboration available is to suggest translations (which will be reviewed by the language/project? administrator.

Admin notes 

The permission must be granted. (project / language / permissions - nobody + suggest)

Each language may have specific or special characters unavailable in the usual keyboards and can be defined in the admin space of the languages of the server.

Assuming Project: olpc Language: spanish

1. Heads to pootle site
2. Follows the olpc project link
3. Enters the spanish language section
4. Picks a file (ie: TamTamSynthLab which has fuzzy entries)
   • The interface will display a series of PO entries (one will have the focus—if it doesn't, hovering over one will make an 'Edit' link appear) that has an entry field, a fuzzy checkbox and the following action buttons:
     • Back — goes back to the previous entry
     • Skip — skips to the next entry (default action)
     • Copy — copies the 'msgid' value (continues in edit mode)
     • Suggest — the actual collaboration
     • Fuzzy — denotes that the suggested translation is/is not 100% trustworthy
     • Special characters specific to the language (see above for definition)
     • grow / shrink — allows growing and shrinking of the entry field
     • Translator comments — comments either extracted from the source code, or added by other translators
5. The opportunistic translator the navigates the file entering suggestions (to be reviewed by the language/project? admin)

Proving Grounds

We are currently testing in an ad-hoc trial site

• configuration
• olpc project statistics

  (PO files were uploaded from fedora—except spanish, which came from the PO versiona in the wiki)

Language	Translated		Fuzzy		Untranslated		Total	Diff.Spanish
arabic	198	78%	7	2%	48	18%	253	1425
portuguese BR	174	84%	12	5%	19	9%	205	1473
french	144	67%	15	7%	53	25%	212	1466
portuguese	12	42%	0	0%	16	57%	28	1650
spanish	1336	79%	342	20%	0	0%	1678

Observations

• Casual translators may only 'suggest' translation
• You can download the PO, so there's no forcing of the on-line UI.
• In the translation interface, fuzzy entries are grayed out and there's a gray vertical line separating the terms

To Do

Usage

• Define goals
• Explore the 'suggest' function & review process
• File maintenance: rename, delete files? How is it done? (ie: uploaded a file with a name that has no POT should not be valid—but I've done it—so if it was a mistake, how do you undo it?)
• Is there any kind of verification when a PO file is uploaded to ensure the up-to-dateness of the original POT on which it is based? (ie: a PO is loaded but the POT on which it is based is a an older version)

Config

• Interface with GIT — both on importing POTs & POs from it & exporting POs back to it.
  • Version Control doc (scant doc on configuration)
• Verify the registration via email

Glitches

• Something related to encodings was wrong during the setup

  Alfonso commented several language specs that apparently were iso8859 instead of UTF ??

• Haven't found the way to read / load the .POT files using git
• User permits seem a bit awkward (per user, no groups except for 'nobody' & 'default')

See also

• http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Translating_with_Pootle