DesktopTranslator

Summary

A Desktop Translator is gtk gnome panel applet for translate ubuntu applications

Rationale

Desktop users have the possibility of translating ubuntu going to Help menu and click in "Translate this application". This is good, but it has several disadvantages:

  • Only the most "curious" users accesses to help menu and "translate this app" item
  • The process is a little bit slow ("Translate this application" opens web browser at launchpad.net, and then the user has to login or register)
  • It's for each application

These difficults could be solved if the way users translate applications are more direct and fast. Desktop Translator is a Gnome (/gtk) panel applet that user could add (as many other gnome panel applets) and directly could translate many applications he/she wants.

With Desktop Translator user choose:

  • what he/she wants to translate:

    • Type of translations: fuzzy translations, all translations, etc
    • Languages: the original language (for example english) and translated language (catalan, spanish, booth)
    • Packages: only one concrete package or all
    • Releases: translations in one release (dapper) or in all releases

  • when she/he wants to translate:

    • Period of time: each day, each month, etc
    • Each session
    • Number of times per period: 4 times in a day...

  • his/her identification:

    • Users could provide an identify (email, name, ...) or translate anonymously

Every time user choose, Desktop Translator notifies that he/she has a translation to translate. Then he opens the applet and puts the translation (perhaps pop-up could be automatically open). The translations were send to launchpad and to the corresponding source of package (for example if user translate epiphany-browser then translation sends to launchpad and mailing-list or bugzilla or whatever epiphany-browser developers specify for sending translations; perhaps it could be optional to send to sources)

Use cases

  • John wants to help ubuntu translating that. He add Desktop Translator in gnome panel and every time some catalan translation is needed he translate it
  • Maria has sparse time. Each session she starts, Desktop Translator provide a pending translation. She loves translate in her free time
  • Pepe is developer of ubuntu. He wants only translate fuzzy translation of firefox. He does not want to see every day in there are such translations in launchpad
  • Yolanda casually adds Desktop Translator to her panel. She do her first translation casually but she see that it's good to translate because in short time applications become translated in her language. So she "addict" to it

Scope

I don't know what scope it has. I suspect that we have:

  • to make the applet itself
  • integrate to launchpad

Design

Basically Desktop users should have:

  • Dialog for translate. It contains:
    • Original language text (provided by Desktop Translator) and what are the original language
    • Final language text (provided by user) abd what are the final lang
    • Type of translation: fuzzy, revision of existing translation, ...
    • Package: gaim, etc
    • User identification
  • Options dialog (in where we put user prefences)

It could be shown as:

English text: "buddy" Catalan text: Package: gaim Type of trans: fuzzy Id: none

Implementation

Sorry, I'm only desktop user. I create this spec following recommendations in https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/59356 I can't help you in that, developers.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

  • The name of original and final language (english and catalan in previous example) should be displayed in desktop language? ("anglès" and "català" if desktop language is catalan) for desktop users who don't know english
  • Perhaps we could link name of the languages to a web page in which there are the translated names of the languages and their iso codes.

BoF agenda and discussion

DesktopTranslator (last edited 2008-08-06 16:16:10 by localhost)