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. She/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 users who have been granted the Review permission in a particular language).

Admin notes

The permission must be granted on a per-language-project basis.

Each language may have specific or special characters that are may not be available in the user's keyboard, but can be provided for in the #Language specification.

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/s entering suggestions (to be processed later by the reviewers)

Registered translator

The default user permissions will/should apply to any registered user, which in the out-of-the-box install include: View, Suggest, Archive & Compile PO files

Admin note

The archive is a zip file, while the compile is the ability to generate .MO files.

In the collaborative and low-entry barrier, the language/project? admin should enable the default user to actually translate — projects | olpc | language | permissions +Translate.

1. Head towards the pootle site
2. Follows the register link where you enter
   • Username
   • Password
   • Confirm password
   • Full Name
   • Email Address
3. After filling the above, hits the [Register Account] button that will send an email to the entered address with the activation code.
4. Following the link in the email with the activation code you confirm its activation.
5. Activating will complete the activation & take you to the user page.
   • Follow the Change options link to define the projects and languages you want to participate (for the moment project:olpc & whichever languages noting that they are multiple select lists) hitting the [Save changes] button to confirm.
   • Other options like personal data & translation UI are present.
   • Return to your user page following the Home Page link in the Option page where the appropriate links to the selected projects & languages should appear.
     • Quick links for each language, and under each language, the projects
       • The language link takes you to the statistics page per project
       • the project-in-a-language takes you the the statistics page displaying all its files

Afterwards, the process is similar to the #Opportunistic translator with the exception that you have an extra button [Submit] that effectively translates the string.

Reviewer

A user who has been granted the Review permission, may accept or reject the suggestions made by users (who must have the Suggest permission). The way to do this is there another? is to go to a language/project combination (ie: spanish-olpc) and follow the Show Editing Functions. Here you have two alternatives: review the whole set of suggestions in the language-project set, or work on the suggestions present in a specific file (ie: all suggestions or TamTamSynthLab suggestions).

Once in the review UI, the reviewer has four options: Accept, Reject, Back or Skip which are self evident, but nevertheless will mention:

Accept

the reviewer translator accepts the suggestion and is registered

Reject

the suggested translation is rejected does that mean erased for the user or the file?

Back

goes to the previous suggestion assume a previous non-accepted/rejected suggestion

Skip

goes to the next available suggestion

In the case where multiple suggestions have been made, each one has its Accept & Reject buttons, while only the last will have the Back & Skip buttons.

Regardless of the multiplicity of suggestions, each suggested string will be diffed with the current string highlighting the changes. It also displays (if available) the name of the user that made the suggestion.

Editing functions

This section of the UI displays on a per-file basis several functionalities that depend on the permissions of the user:

Translate My Strings

enter the translate UI limiting the visibility to those strings assigned to the user. explore

Quick Translate My Strings

same as above, unknown difference. explore

Quick Translate

enter the translate UI over the whole set? explore

Translate All

explore

PO file

used for off-line translators in order to retrieve the whole .PO file.

XLIFF file

used for off-line translators and interfaces to retrieve the whole file in said format. explore

Qt .ts file

explore

CSV file

explore

Administrator

Site

As an administrator, in your home page you have access to the Admin page which offers: Users, Languages & Projects. There are other general options of yet unknown use and impact

Users

is a simple interface allowing the manual addition of users, edition of their names & (invisible) passwords (ie: resetting them) and where you can activate, de-activate and remove an user.

Languages

allows the maintenance of the list of available languages (based on the ISO 639 codes, a descriptive text, special characters (used in the translating UI), defining the number of plurals and its equation.

NOTE: I've removed several (traditional) languages trying to limit the list to the core green languages: am, ar, en, es, fr, ha, hi, ig, ne, pt, ro, ru, rw, th, ur, & yo. Still pending: plural formulas.

Projects

this is the initial page where things come together. Besides being able to add/remove project (what are all the other fields? you can follow each project to define the 'enabled languages' for it, and where you can add more languages. how do you remove a language from a project??

This is where you can also update from templates—POTs. The update from templates functionality is still not understood.

For example, following the olpc project link you will find the list of languages. Each language (a link) takes you to the user permissions in said project-language combination.

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

User permissions

The following is the list of the available permissions handled by Pootle. The actual description is a result of observation and deduction (haven't found a specific documentation on them), so they are to be considered with #, fuzzy tag...

Permission	Description	Default users	Comments
View	Allows the browsing of the PO files and their translation	nobody, default
Suggest	Allows to suggest a translation	default	this should be enabled for nobody if we want to make things simpler for the #Opportunistic translator.
Translate	Allows to submit a translation.	none	By default there are no users allowed to translate forcing the administrator to grant this right—bureaucratic and restrictive.
Overwrite	When uploading a PO file, it allows the user to overwrite any existing file (iow, no merge of changes)	none	Handle with care.
Review	Allows to approve/reject suggestions made by users capable of suggesting translations.	none	need to explore
Archive	Would allow the user to download the whole set of PO files in zip format. Probably those of a language/project.	none	need to explore
Compile PO files	Allows an user to generate / compile the PO into MO files.	none	It is unknown where the MO files will reside, or how they will be transfered or made available. need to explore
Assign	Allows an user to assign files (or chunks of files) amongst users that have been granted the translate permission.	none	need to explore
Administrate	It's granularity is not well defined (or understood): administrate everything (seems like it), or just a project? or just a language? or just a language-in-a-project?	none	need to explore
Commit	The holy grail or point of all this: make a translation available.	none	Again, the granularity is not well defined or understood. need to explore

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')

Bug dealing with Suggestions

There seems to be something awry with the suggestions... somehow there seems to be a mismatch between the msgid for which the suggestion was made, and the msgid displayed in the review process. IOW, you suggest foo as a translation of bar, but in the review process it will show it as a suggestion for xyzzy!! review problem!

Talking in IRC#pootle, the following emerged: the mechanism used to associate a given suggestion is based on the #: comments (usually documenting the source code line where the string is located). This mechanism fails when there are more than one strings extracted from the same source line.

Possible solutions & workarounds

the problem is relatively serious as it inhibits the #Opportunistic translator (or any other translator) from making suggestions (as they may get lost).

• modify the source code to avoid having more than one gettext string per line.
• modify the POT to avoid duplicate comments (iow, a manual process)
• disable the suggestions
  • explore the possibility of having the offending POT in another project where suggestions are not allowed (thus avoid reviewers get bitten by it).
• patch Pootle (or file a bug)

See also

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