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Reviewing Galician debconf template translations

By jacobo, on 2008-7-31 at 01:40, under Translation, Debian

Running the Galician debconf template translation as an one-man show has an obvious problem: translations don’t get reviewed. Being only one, I would only catch typos, and the odd thinko, which is not very useful. The real use of reviews is to see if the grammar is sound, see if the translation sounds natural or forced, etc., and it has to be someone else who does it. If I review my own translations, of course they’ll be perfect.

When someone else picks those translations up after I stop doing them, it would be useful to make a full review. Fortunately, I’ve been keeping a compendium of (almost) all debconf template translations, so doing the review is as simple as downloading that single file and reading it.

I’d recommend that one single person read the full document and makes notes of grammatical/orthographic mistakes, common patterns, vocabulary choices, etc., and then those notes should be used to go through the compendium again and fix and update everything. The result would be useful for two things:

First, it is a very big collection of examples you can point people to when they don’t know what style to use to translate. So, when someone asks in the mailing list about the best way to translate “Couldn’t create temporary file”, you can search for similar sentences, see how they were translated and suggest the same solution.

Second, you can use that compendium to apply the results of the review to all translated packages very quickly. The idea is to regenerate the .PO file from the compendium. You can do it actively (see what packages have had their debconf templates translated into Galician, download .POT files, apply compendium, upload .PO files) or reactively (when you have to update a .PO file, download the .POT instead and apply the compendium, then update the resulting .PO file).

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