Launchpad/translation: Add comment during translation process

[Aputsiak Niels Janussen]

During the translation and review process translators have a need to communicate.

I'd like to suggest that Launchpad add a comment field, which translators can use.
This exists in Pootle.
A comment to a translation can be useful in various ways.
For example, take these three use cases for a comment field:
1)
Sometimes one cannot decide how to translate a specific term in an entry - and I will simply skip the entry.
It would be better if one gave it ones best shot, made a comment about the particular term and contributed.
2)
Other times during a review process, I'd like to add a comment about grammar or language teams conventions, so that other translators can pick up on a translation with errors.
3)
Sometimes I've just changed a single letter in a long string, but still need someone else to review the suggestion - and would like to indicate this in a comment as a help to the reviewer.

The need for a comment is described in a user story here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OgMaciel/blueprints/rosetta

The topic has been raised and discussed in this question (the above is not about making use of the already existing option to instruct translators through the POT-template):
https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/100088

Best regards!

[Ask Hjorth Larsen (askhl)]

Agreed. To elaborate: Launchpad Translations is, I think, supposed to be a collaborative tool for translating. But Launchpad presently implements no channel of communication whatsoever between translators. This means it's not truly collaborative - it's just parallel over people. The translations.launchpad.net frontpage states that it's "wiki-style" collaboration, but we know from wikipedia that the discussion pages are *essential*. They attach the discussions to the actual article. Also, when one changes a wikipedia article, one writes a summary of the changes (e.g. "typo fixes" or other relevant information). Just like this, we (translators that are not working in isolation) need to be able to associate information with the changes that we make.

Right now, if indeed people communicate, they have to do it in roundabout ways such as by sending an email referring to "that string all the way over in Launchpad with this URL". This is highly time consuming, and the information in that email will then quickly be lost in the email archive rather than be visible where it matters: In the translation interface.

On another note, one should distinguish between two types of comments: Those that are meant to accompany the translation (equivalent to gettext comments), and those that pertain to the workflow communication between translators and proofreaders (these should not be used quite in the same way, but they are also essential).

To sum up, I think the importance of these features is significantly underestimated.

(Also I recall that this is close to being a duplicate of another bug from som years ago.)

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

dupe of bug 25