On 11-05-29 12:34 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/5/29 Ashar Voultoiz hashar+wmf@free.fr:
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
The purpose of the frequent updates is to give the translators a feeling that something actually happens with the work they do. On a wiki an editor sees his changes immediately, which is a Good Thing, and the translation system tries to get as close as possible to that.
I am working with many other software translation websites - Launchpad (Rosetta), GlotPress, BabelZilla, Narro and others. None of them gets anywhere near Translatewiki.net in giving to the translators that good feeling that their work is seen by other people. This good feeling is one of the main things that drives the translators to translate more. This is a strong and frequently overlooked advantage, which the MediaWiki community has over many other localized software communities, and it must be kept.
That said, being a coder myself, i can understand that it can be a burden on the developers, and i would welcome any solution that doesn't ruin the above-mentioned advantage. Maybe a separate repo for translations?.. Sorry, i'm not much of an SCM expert.
Just a thought that came into my head...
If our i18n system's messages weren't php based. And we filtered out hazardous things like the .css/.js pages. And made sure that we didn't have raw-html messages lying around. Wouldn't that remove the burden of potential arbitrary code execution, and XSS, and make it possible to update translations nearly instantaneously? At the very least after a message has simply been peer-reviewed by a few other users who have translated a good bit before and earned a reputation (code based one as it may be). Or at least just with the ability to preview a public wiki with one's own translations.
Can't think of anything more motivating than seeing the message you updated show up on Wikipedia while you're browsing shortly after you update it.