Continuous localisation with Pootle (1st draft)

Transcript

1. Continuous Localisation with Pootle Ryan Northey TranslateHouse
2. Translate house • began promoting support for minority languages in FLOSS software, particularly in South Africa • enabled adoption of FLOSS within public sector • raised awareness of the importance of localisation within FLOSS communities • brought together and supported localisation communities • since then Dwayne Bailey has worked with many projects and localisation initiatives
3. Our work today • providing and supporting tools for localisation, particularly software localisation • Translate Toolkit - parsers and converters for localisation formats • Pootle - Online translation tool • supporting and promoting a wider open source localisation ecosystem
4. Continuous localisation • Broadly taking from the concept of continuous integration in software – automated building and testing – development monitoring and notifications – shared "upstream" – distributed repositories – versioning, forking and diffing • How applicable is it in the localisation context? • Are there other factors in localisation?
5. Build automation and test cycle • Some of the tools for automated quality control are there - eg quality checkers • Less so in terms of build testing, monitoring and notifications • Create a virtuous cycle of improvement • Build organisational memory
6. The Fork, the fork, and the git fork • Prior to distributed versioning forking was generally frowned upon • Not all forks are the same - Eric Raymond talks of "pseudo-forks" in Cathedral and the Bazaar • Distributed versioning allowed: – local branches – multiple upstreams – tools to work with them • The real change came with tools to work between branches
7. Fork me on github • Allowed developers to maintain separate branches and easily re-integrate changes • Central to this were diffing tools and in particular the "Pull Request" • Forking, branching and merging could also be possible in localisation with the right tools • These tools are essential for localisation to mirror what is happening in the software
8. Other aspects of continuous integration in localisation • Translation Memory • Machine translation • Terminology • Offer possibilites of: – Automation – Quality control/linting – Collaboration/shared resources
9. Pootle the PO editor • started out mostly file-based and file-focused • PO-centric, although ttk allowed compatibility with other formats • some support for "monolingual" formats and vcs previously
10. Continuous localisation with Pootle • making Pootle performant/scalable • moving away from file-based view of localisation data • adding continuous integration processes to the Pootle project
11. Native format support • adding support for multiple formats • internally still using a a PO-like representation • customizable/native ui support • de/serialization to/from and between formats
12. Pootle fs • Flagship project to restore vcs integration • Added a pluggable synchronization engine • localfs/git/mercurial support so far • Still in beta but well tested and fairly stable
13. Future plans • Exploring use of XLIFF: – data-interchange between platforms – Internal format representation • Improved revision support • Diff tools for showing changes between revisions and potentially localisation “branches” • Improved notifications and web-sockets