[Qgis-community-team] [Qgis-tr] Issues with translation

Mon Mar 14 04:05:16 PDT 2022

Hi Jörn,
Thanks for the compilation. My reply below is a mix of
translator/transifex manager/doc coordinator hat so bear with me if I
don't directly provide tips you expect or I instead move the question
to another level. Some issues are indeed inherent to Transifex (or at
least to its free version we are using) and others are QGIS
community/organization's. It's also not always clear to me whether the
issue you report concerns docs or desktop so a mix of replies.

Le 7 mars 2022 14:47:30 GMT+01:00, "Jörn Gutzeit"
<j.gutzeit at umwelt-it.de> a écrit :
>Transifex Webtranslation page for QGIS is on https://www.transifex.com/qgis/
>
>Hi,
>
>as written [1], I did a small survey of german translators and there
>problems. It refers not only to Transifex but also to other processes
>and structures. We hope that perhaps other translator groups can help us
>with experience and tips:
>
>
>- Some people find it difficult to get started with Transifex. Is there
>any experience if workshops can help to get started? Is there perhaps
>already a video tutorial (that could be translated or subtitled)?
>

I don't know but maybe their doc can be a starting point [0]?
What I personally miss is a visible place where we can actually
instruct people how to do translations, to avoid build issues, the
rules to respect (which at some point may depend on languages but
...).

>- It is not possible to preview the translation, e.g. to identify errors
>in the formatting syntax. Is there an editor or another way to do this?
>Building the doc on their own system does not seem to be an option for
>everyone.
>

No editor I'm aware of. Transifex provides a "Transifex Live" service
to translate directly in the HTML build docs interface, allowing to
preview/apply directly, in live. I tested it last year for docs and it
looked quite complicated to setup (a lot of manual work for
administrators afaics) and it turned out to be a paid service. Can't
understand how I could have access to it :D.
And no, unlike weblate e.g., Transifex does not provide advanced
checks on translated strings. You have parenthesis count or numeric
value missing checks but not many more.

>- It happens that "dead" or duplicate resources appear in Transifex, so
>it is sometimes unclear what actually needs to be translated. How can
>you find out what actually appears in the manual, what needs to be
>translated?
>
Is this about the docs or the code? Do you have any examples, please?

Speaking of the docs, we translate one version at a time and
archived/closed the previous so they wouldn't interfere with the new
release. Furthermore, since 3.16, we are relying on a transifex/github
action [1] [2] that every Wednesday pushes English string to
transifex.

About QGIS Desktop translation, the process is a bit different. But as
long as someone reports that there is an old release resource still
ON, it gets shut quickly afaics. So it's also up to translators to
report to admins (that may forget these manual steps).
BTW, @Jürgen E. Fischer can you please remove 3.16 and 3.20 resources
from the Desktop project? Thanks.

>- You have to keep the structure of the english original, even if it is
>incomplete or out of date, so you cannot delete or add a paragraph. Are
>there any ideas on how to solve this?
>

I don't think these are all impossible... But the solution I can
suggest is "Fix it in the source!". That is the most sustainable
solution. It works for you and for the rest of the community.
<mylife>I started contributing to QGIS as translator, and was
regularly reporting issues I found in original strings, as a Transifex
comment in the right side panel. The recurring reply I got from our
coordinator (hello Yves) was "Thanks. But report in docs/code repo". I
followed his advice and got things fixed until I realized one day that
it was easier/faster to fix some issues than reporting them.</mylife>

>- We have not found a way to get a message when a translation is reset
>to english (because there have been changes made). So you don't notice
>that something in an already translated part is displayed in English
>again. How do others solve this problem?
>

Maybe there's an individual option to get notification [3]. But would
that not be really noisy?
I'm not sure there's an history of each string: the new string is
added and the no longer available one is "removed" (though kept in Tx
memory and reused as suggestion). No inheritance between them.
Speaking of the docs, the best way to fix this is to avoid strings
modification after the version is open to translation. Meaning that
the docs is complete enough at that time and no changes are allowed
unless very buggy. I'm afraid this won't be the case for 3.22 but if
WE manage correctly, maybe the next LTR could be fine.

>- It sometimes happens that translations are not displayed at all or
>only after a long time. A current example: 14.1 The Vector Properties
>Dialogue: translated on 25.01.2022, not yet online. Maybe there are
>errors, but how can you find out?

Errors do not prevent translation display. We build and show the
erroneous translation so that translators can fix them.
The issue you are seeing here is due to a Transifex config we setup,
that automatically pulls translation when it is 100% translated [4] so
until the file is fully translated, no translation is pulled back.
Nasty, I know. To solve this, I regularly do a manual pull and commit
to the docs repo. And given that this is also unsustainable, I tried
to write a github action to regularly do the pull [5], it works
locally but not on github and none of my calls for help did get any
attention so... until that day there's unfortunately a risk to display
strings in English despite translated in Tx.
Should be fixed now for most of the languages. Still faced some quirks
with Transifex server but 3.22 docs in Tx is anyway planned for very
soon.
>
>One of the main problems seems to be that already translated paragraphs
>are reset to English (and there is no message about it). It looks like
>the German translation could be quite a bit further by just restoring
>the lost translations (we had previously assumed that this only happened
>with changes, but if I understand correctly, there are other problems as
>well [2]).
>Is there any idea how to solve this problem?

Hmmm.. I'm not anymore really sure of this "pluralization"-strings
issue you are referring to. I gave a look later to the strings and
could find many translated strings older than the 3.24 release day
[6]. So Transifex didn't wipe all the strings that were of
pluralization form when the new ones were pushed in. I can't tell what
happened that day but I'm not sure that translations just vanish from
time to time, nor if they really vanished that day. Could there be
that the so-called "lost" strings were duplicate strings instead? Most
of the time, translations are lost because the English strings change.
Duplicate text in another file also may not have the translation
connected (hence we think they are lost - maybe there's a setting to
activate somewhere to have it do this automatically/better?)

Sorry for being long.

Regards,
Harrissou

[0] https://docs.transifex.com/translation/translating-with-the-web-editor
[1] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/blob/master/.github/workflows/pofiles.yml
[2] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation#translating
[3] https://www.transifex.com/user/settings/notices/
[4] https://docs.transifex.com/transifex-github-integrations/github-tx-ui#linking-a-specific-project-with-a-github-repository
[5] https://github.com/DelazJ/QGIS-Documentation/blob/minimizeTranslations/.github/workflows/pull_minimized_translations.yml
[6] https://www.transifex.com/qgis/QGIS/translate/#de/qgis-application/114102351?q=text%3A%25n+translated_before%3A2022-02-18
- just replace the language code

>
>
>Greetings,
>Jörn
>
>[1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-tr/2022-February/001307.html
>[2] „Reoccuring strings“
>https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-tr/2022-February/001299.html
>
>--
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