Launchpad itself

Bug #264122
Comment #4

Comment 4 for bug 264122

Revision history for this message

Andrew Sayers (andrew-bugs-launchpad-net) wrote on 2008-09-25:

I guess I wasn't being clear about the underlying issue. Here's the tale of woe that lead me to this report:

I had uploaded a translation template, which was then translated into a couple of other languages by other people. Then I rearranged the program, changed a lot of text (sometimes correcting typos, sometimes rewriting completely) and uploaded a new template. When the new template went through, all the old translated text vanished unless there was an identical match in the new template. Given the amount of work we'd put in to finding the correct translations for technical terms, it was pretty demoralising for us to see our work yanked away - it was also quite embarrassing for me personally that I'd destroyed people's work. I hadn't kept a note of which revision of the program I'd used to generate the original template, so even when I realised that it might be possible to get texts back by uploading old templates, my only choice was to keep uploading older versions until I found one that had all the right translations in. Because of the amount of time reviews take, that meant stopping translation work for the best part of a week. When I finally got all the translations I needed, I was able to reinstate most of the translations myself (a semicolon is a semicolon in any language), and proper translators were able to trivially rewrite the remainder of the old text.

In my opinion, the biggest bug in that situation was that LP doesn't give you any way to view translations for old templates - if we could have just seen the old translations, we could have copy/pasted 90% of it in a few hours. I agree that there's no perfect way for a computer to detect whether two strings have similar meanings, but if two similar strings occur at the same point in the same file, it seems sensible to me that you'd use translations of the first as an initial suggestion, albeit marked for someone to review the translation.

My ideal solution would be for LP to maintain translations in a bazaar branch, so that people could use the standard tools to merge/revert/etc. old translations. That's way more work than I'm willing to ask of others though, which is why I've limited myself to requesting you document the problems well enough that users can work around them.

I guess I wasn't being clear about the underlying issue.  Here's the tale of woe that lead me to this report:

I had uploaded a translation template, which was then translated into a couple of other languages by other people.  Then I rearranged the program, changed a lot of text (sometimes correcting typos, sometimes rewriting completely) and uploaded a new template.  When the new template went through, all the old translated text vanished unless there was an identical match in the new template.  Given the amount of work we'd put in to finding the correct translations for technical terms, it was pretty demoralising for us to see our work yanked away - it was also quite embarrassing for me personally that I'd destroyed people's work.  I hadn't kept a note of which revision of the program I'd used to generate the original template, so even when I realised that it might be possible to get texts back by uploading old templates, my only choice was to keep uploading older versions until I found one that had all the right translations in.  Because of the amount of time reviews take, that meant stopping translation work for the best part of a week.  When I finally got all the translations I needed, I was able to reinstate most of the translations myself (a semicolon is a semicolon in any language), and proper translators were able to trivially rewrite the remainder of the old text.

In my opinion, the biggest bug in that situation was that LP doesn't give you any way to view translations for old templates - if we could have just seen the old translations, we could have copy/pasted 90% of it in a few hours.  I agree that there's no perfect way for a computer to detect whether two strings have similar meanings, but if two similar strings occur at the same point in the same file, it seems sensible to me that you'd use translations of the first as an initial suggestion, albeit marked for someone to review the translation.

My ideal solution would be for LP to maintain translations in a bazaar branch, so that people could use the standard tools to merge/revert/etc. old translations.  That's way more work than I'm willing to ask of others though, which is why I've limited myself to requesting you document the problems well enough that users can work around them.