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 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)

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.

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

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