@coolparth
Quote:
2. People maintaining the core packs ( I am willing to chip in for Marathi to start with) can use these resources generated via such crowd sourcing to create official packs .
"People" maintaining core packs have first created them, are called Coordinators for their language, manage their own Teams, control the Translations as a Team and also via their language communities feedback.
They do not let anyone use Google Translate or make important grammar or misinterpretation errors because of the poor knowledge of the language itself or the wrong understanding of the context of the strings.
They make sure they use/add the right JPlurals when necessary, that there is consistency in the usage of phrases, wording.
At all time, they do control the quality of the packs.
"Crowd sourcing" as you call it is the basis for bad translations that would have to be corrected systematically by these Coordinators, thus increasing drastically the work necessary to create a working Core pack. Also, as anybody can do anything, some good stuff can be easily overwritten by anyone.
Not speaking of the necessary fast follow-up when new Joomla versions are released.
Generally speaking, for Core packs as well as for extensions, while at first sight it seems like an easy web based tool to create and maintain a translation and work together as a team, we have found a number of disadvantages in comparing with the systems we use as Translation Teams at this moment. Just to name some of them:
● Everyone can jump in and transform a good translation to a bad one, there is no approval process or anything.
● The coordinators for each language have no control on who is doing what, on which project.
● It's hard to test the translations live on a site, since that requires you to download one by one each file - and not a pack. Meaning everyone is doing blind translations over there.
(A simple example: Anyone who has been working with the variables %s in a string called by a JText::sprintf will understand that blind translations are not the way to go)
● One cannot add missing strings in a translation file and still has to contact the developer about it as most TT translators are already doing now
● A translation file gets locked for (+)24 hours, meaning one can not easily correct a typo, in comparison with collaboration via svn which is easy.
● Our new JText::plural needs some supplementary/different strings to be added/changed depending on languages. Transifex interface does not let do that.
Therefore, if some 3rd party developers are satisfied with this, it is their problem and alas has consequences on the users installing their extensions. They would better ask the registered Translation teams to help, as many have already be doing that job in their communities and gladly made their translations available to the 3pd developers.
Concerning Core packs, Joomla! project has to be more selective. We do not speak here of a few strings but thousands of them.
I hope this clarifies our position on this.
If you want to volunteer for Marathi Core packs, you are welcome, read the Translation policy and just start the work. But you are now aware of the issues with the transifex system.
Note: there are no "Official" packs, there are "Registered" packs.
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Jean-Marie Simonet / infograf ·
http://www.info-graf.fr Multilanguage in 2.5: http://help.joomla.org/files/EN-GB_multilang_tutorial.pdf---------------------------------
Joomla Translation Coordination Team • Joomla! Production Working Group
