[Translators-l] Ready for early translation: Tech News summary #29

[Philippe Verdy]

Ready for French. Note that the rmergency translation tou avertized last
monday came too late. When I was notified, I started it immediatelyn but
you had already taken a bogous snapshot of it, which was not corrected and
contained obvious errors (that I have corrected even before I received the
post sent by the bot on my French Wikipedia user page (the bot took an
outdated translation taken several hours before).
Really you have several problems: whe nwe subscribe for notifications by
email, the Wikimedia email agent will take hours before sending the mail
(much longer than what you expect: generally it is sent within the next 12
hours; if you send an emergency translation by using this bot, we won't
receive the email immedaitely. Then it may take some hours before we
actually read it (we are possibly sleeping, this was the case when I opened
that email...), then we need a few hours to complete the translations and
review it (performing additional checks aout the rendered page, the targets
of links, and checking the terminology when the tech note describes a UI
element of the interface, making sure it is coherent.
A final read may further detect some monor typos. In summary, 24 hours is
an ABSOLUTE minimum. NEVER fall below that limit. Some languages need other
delays (French for example will target mostly users in Europe and Africa,
even if there are Frennch users elsewhere in the world. counting the local
time into account, and the fact that people are sleeping or moving to their
work or coming back, or eating, they are not in front of their PCs to reply
immediately to the requests.
That's why these news shoud be prepared more progressively. I suggest that
you include another page for further notifications that will be translated
early, before you decide to include them in a newsletter. This way, we can
still prepare the translations in a beta page. This page should contain
everything that is beong worked or is planned provisionally for the next 4
weeks. Things could be prepared that will be stable, notably documentation
pages that the tech notes will be linking to. The technical features
themselves would be translated during their beta.
You should always know in advance what you'll schedule for the next week,
at least 7 days before. I think there's absolutely no need to publish
something too early. Learn to be patient (of course some tech news cannot
be planned sich as reporting incidents, in a very summary way, with a link
to a page to follow it more completely).
Every change in Wikimedia configuration or design should be planned, and
tested with some betas. These beta periods are ideal to prepare accurate
translations. It will be simpler to work on translations because they will
be more accurate.
In addition, you should monitor edits made on the English version you
create, before taking a final snapshot for marking fuzzy things. Often we
can detect typos or inaccaries. If you don't like these edits on the
Englihs original, you an revert and discuss with the translator (you know
who made the edits: make the source translations editable only by
registered users that can be contacted in case of problems; these problems
may be lack of understanding or lack or clarity pr precision in the source
text).

(Note: I cannot mark these pages on Meta for making them ready for
translations, or marking other existing transaltions as fuzzy or to
confirm, using the translations adminsitrator tool, and we still lack a way
to communiate with the one that proposed the source to translate; writing
on the English talk page generally gives no response at all; remarks are
ignored, and this is even more critical for these weekly translations that
have a short schedule of a few hours only: the person that decides to press
the GO button on the publication bot does not monitor the existing
problems).
-------------- section suivante --------------
Une pi? jointe HTML a ? nettoy?..
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/attachments/20130713/c1b5e5b7/attachment.html>