Additional notes can be found HERE

Workshop plan

WHAT?

What is localization.

More than translation, adapting language to a local context.

WHY?

Why localize?

• Context, making something adaptable, participation.
• Reaching other communities and reachability of software and advocacy reasons.
• Preservation of minority language.
• People taking ownership and preservation of language.
• Assumption that English prevails wrong even for technical environments.
• Adapting tools to local context.
• Extra testing and feedback from users.
• Increasing usability of tools, allowing people to have ownership over tools, feedback and insight.
• Localizing technical tools and technical documentation for technical tools.

TOOLS and UIs

Tools and why have them / make them.

Tool, example URL, number of people that work and worked with them (from this workshop)

• Pootle: https://translations.documentfoundation.org/ro/ 1
• Pontoon: https://pontoon.mozilla.org/ro/ 2
• Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/voxelands/voxelands/translate/#ro/voxelandspot/117642715?translated=no everyone
• Crowdin: https://crowdin.com/translate/wire-cs/1184/en-ro 3
• Weblate: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-installer/ everyone
• Zanata (Fedora and RedHat): https://fedora.zanata.org 1
• Damned Lies (Gnome): https://l10n.gnome.org/ 1
• Babelzilla (Mozilla addons, defunct) 2
• programmer-oriented tools: github, gitlab 4
• no tools: git/e-mail 5
• launchpad: ubuntu-related 2
• Offline tools: Poedit, CAT tools, SDL

Favorite tool: Pontoon

Least favorite tool: Transifex

Why people dislike some tools:

• lack of ownership of translation and of data (like cloud-based solutions)
• lack of granularity of permissions
• having to sign up to a website and the security implications of that

FEATURES

Features we want from a translation UI:

• list of strings view (most basic requirement)
• translation memory: Transifex may not work across projects, also Amagama (now abandoned)
  • missing feature: contextual TM
• terminology
• automated translation (people noted Google Translate as better than Microsoft's Bing Translate)
  • a workshop participant noted that there are free software solutions for automated translation, such as TMServer
• related strings in other languages
  • a member noted a French tool -- Traduction
• related strings in other projects
• checks (consistency & formatting & custom)
• ability to report bad source string to developer
• ability to ask questions about the source string
  • does anyone get notified when questions arrive? (yes in weblate)

Missing features from tooling today:

• good search and replace, regex search
• timelines (string contribution history of a certain user) useful for reviewers
  • Pontoon has useless timelines
  • Pootle has timelines, but not useful for large reviews

The talk was cut short as we ran out of time.

What we didn't talk about, but was on the agenda:

• Tools don't offer UIs specific to a Reviewer's role, such as:

  • personalized reviews
  • formal review with standard quality checks (MQM)

• Tools need better UIs for project managers and maintainers:

  • granular permissions
  • who just started to contribute
  • what changed recently
  • who added what recently
  • which people modified this string

• Tools have limited or no support for notifications in the UI:

  • deadlines
  • when new users arrive
  • when new strings are added

For Pontoon specifically, there is a Firefox Extention: Pontoon Tools that adds a limited set of notifications.

• Discuss tooling support for offline work and what more we need from them, like data export
• Discuss about what would it take to move some people off offline and into tool UIs

COMPARE

We didn't get to cover also the following:

• Feature matrix of existing tools

• What we need to make the review process faster, better, higher quality, with better feedback

• Quality assurance, checks, formal feedback (MQM)

• Terminology control and terminology hierarchies