Overview
This page will document the conversation around the best practices discussed in the main article.
A big thank you to Oksana (aviriel) for setting us up on CrowdIn and maintaining that infrastructure!
Many of the ideas for best practices in translation and working with CrowdIn were inspired by the guidelines published by the Flattr community.
Renaming Files
The Alfresco resource files that are uploaded to CrowdIn do not have a language suffix, but they need to have a suffix for each language to which they are translated before they can be installed so that Alfresco can correctly switch between languages.
CrowdIn supports setting the exported file name on a per file basis. We could use this capability to reduce the nesting of folders by having each file renamed into it's correct subdirectory. However, Alfresco is too large of a project to change the setting for every file. Instead we are using scrips to add the suffix on download or build and living with the nesting.
Managing Versions
CrowdIn does not have a capability to handle simultaneously translating different versions of a project. They recommend using a subdirectory for each version since the translation memory will translate duplicated strings. This has two downsides:
- The project gets very big, which is hard to import and export.
- The project statistics will look bad for each new language unless someone goes back and translates the strings in older versions. This makes the translations look lower quality than they actually are.
However, replacing all of the strings can interrupt a translation that is going well. To mitigate this problem we:
- coordinate release timing on the Alfresco Translators mailing list
- take a snapshot of all the strings for the old version and post it for download at http://alflocal.ossportal.ru
- encourage each translation project to have a separate project site with a source control repository where old translations can be completed and maintained
We think this is reasonable because we hope to direct enthusiasm toward translating the most recent version of Alfresco.
--Resplin (talk) 21:08, 15 March 2013 (GMT)
CrowdIn support says:
- You can setup export patterns for the files automatically, using Crowdin CLI tool. (More information here http://crowdin.net/page/cli-tool)
- You may also have separate Crowdin projects for multiple version of Alfresco. Translations could be migrated using our 'Pre-Translate' feature and the TM sharing option.
I think what we are doing is good enough for now.
--Resplin (talk) 17:05, 19 March 2013 (GMT)
