Web Translation tool

[Janet Black]

It's exciting to see work being put towards having an actual
translation workflow and easier onboarding for new translators!

I brought this up in KDE Chat, but I feel the need to reiterate it here.

Do you know what a translation workflow needs to be besides literally
just a .po file editor? (/rhetorical)
There is a lot of prior art that you can examine wrt translation
workflow, as well as a lot of current and
potential-but-currently-unserved translators to figure out what their
needs are.
Figuring out what translators need should be done *before* writing the
code, so that you fit the code to serve the needs, instead of trying
to fit the needs to serve the code.

The proposed structure of the interface has a lot of opportunities for
improvement, a lot of which seems to stem from the point above. e.g.
"here is a chunk of random changes across multiple projects" isn't
really a common or useful unit for translation review.

Anyhow, I'm fully supportive of having a standardised translation
workflow and lifting the load off of team coordinators to figure out
how to build their own kingdom of translations, as well as making
onboarding of new translators Infinity% better. I've lost track of how
many complaints I've seen about how unfriendly the current (lack of a)
workflow is to people interested in translating KDE into all sorts of
languages. Most recently is [1] from GNOME translators getting offput
by our current situation.

If we survived transitioning from Phabricator to GitLab for code
review, I'm sure we can survive transitioning from [unidentifiable
thing] to WebL10n or some other such thing for translation review.

Cheers,
Janet

[1] https://matrix.to/#/!gPBzgJgTEfNgtSxNPX:matrix.org/$171058961646632eWBXI:matrix.org?via=gnome.org&via=matrix.org&via=fedora.im


On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 7:49 PM Carl Schwan <carl at carlschwan.eu> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> A few days ago, I suddenly got the motivation to look into building a small
> web tool for our translation designed in a way that it can coexist with the
> current workflow. It was also an excuse to learn a bit of Rust 🦀 and to refresh
> my knowledge on VueJs :)
>
> The idea is to have a simple website allowing people to login with their
> gitlab account and then let them edit the po files with a web ui. For KDE
> developers/translators, it would allow to either publish their changes
> immediately to SVN or save their changes inside the database to allow someone
> else to review them. For non kde developers, only after a review would the
> change be allowed to be merged in SVN.
>
> Here is the repository: https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/webl10n/
>
> Currently this is still very much in progress but I can already login with
> gitlab, load all po files in the summit directory in SVN, submit changes to the
> db, and then display the changes in a 'review' interface and I'm progressing
> quite fast. To give you a better idea, how the current progress I alsoed
> uploaded a bunch of screenshots to my website:
>
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/home.png
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/components.png
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/files.png
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/editor.png
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/editor-confirmation.png
> https://carlschwan.eu/assets/webl10n/review.png
>
> Before I invest more time on it, it would be good to have some feedback on the
> idea and if there is someone among you who is familiar with Rust or VueJs,
> help is also welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> Carl
>
>
>