Locking part of the translation ?

Crowdsourcing mods translations.
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HawK-EyE
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Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2021 1:23 am

Locking part of the translation ?

Post by HawK-EyE »

Continuation of the message from Magus on Discord about the possibility to "lock" the french translation for specific users :

@HawK-EyE Well, it's a lengthy topic. I'll give you some points to think over and maybe we can continue on the forum.

1. Yes, interface strings have that issue in various languages. But there's just a few of them, and I haven't seen one case so far that actually made them bad. Do you have an example of that? Do you have example of someone producing many bad translations? A few errors is normal for someone who starts to translate. A pattern of that is not good.

2. The thing is, what you're saying is that you want control over who gets to translate and who doesn't. So how is it going to work? Are you going to never ever let anyone else work on it? Are you going to make some acceptance criteria into the translators group, and approve people manually? What are the criteria going to be?

3. With power comes responsibility. If we do make a restricted group, then it is that group's responsibility to complete and maintain the translation. Are you ready to make commitments? Some kind of promises regarding the completion - and keep them, of course? And have some way for people which are not in your selected group to provide input when they disagree with the way you have translated strings, and process that input fairly and timely? Because what happens if you lose interest or life gets in the way? We don't need a dog in the manger situation

4. Did you consider less drastic measures? Would it be enough to lock several strings and prevent their translation from changing? Did you check Weblate docs to see if it's possible?

5. Or, since you say that people get confused, maybe simply write a guide for them? There's forum for that. And you can comment the strings in the system itself, too.

6. There are also other workflows (suggestions with reviewers and stuff), about which you can also read in weblate docs, maybe you'll like those.

7. And you can actually subscribe to changes.

8. I did not develop the system, just adapted it for mods. So, overall, I would prefer that people self-organize for better collaboration. There's forum for that. If for some reason that doesn't work out, then I could be convinced to start locking down permissions, but as you see from the points above, first I'd like to see all other ways exhausted.

Also, I think @AL|EN had the same request at some point, right? And after some investigation, we came to conclusion that we'd need to upgrade the system first. And right now we can't upgrade, because of the issue I linked today.

So if you'd like to see that happen, then comment on github and help convince the developers to prioritize this issue. Bottom line: it is possible, but you'll need to do some legwork to make it happen (and I hope that in the process a better solution would be found). (modifié)

Ok the topic is very interesting and I can't really answer all the points very well now because its like 2am and I just found out your answer on discord.

The bottom line is : currently there is no way to prevent anyone to completely mess with the translation if they want to.
The only way to correct mistakes is by using the restore button on history which would modify only one translation at a time.
The case didn't happen but if this happen it's gonna be very long to correct everything. The github won't be affected though because we can come back to a previous commmit, but on weblate it's one-by-one ...

And previously, there was a function to upload a full file (like a .po or a .csv) and there was no way to prevent this file upload as well.
But it seems that you have desactivated this function.

Ok 

1) On many possible examples, I have to pick the accent problems. Because we have many accents and special characters in french (é è ç à ö ô ê etc...) that were previously impossible to add in specific part of the the translation (maps, interface, splash screens, etc..) and it was like that during the past 20 years... We discussed that a lot with docteurkain because last sfall versions change the way the accents are handled. Now it work pretty much everywhere and this is really great. But many people may not know this new feature and could make errors on the presence of accents or not in the strings. Other examples are the specific spaces before and after the punctuation and the strings before and after the values in dollars/caps, that are usually very different than in the english version. You earn $300 = Vous gagnez 300 $ and the value could be %s in a separated string. It is very difficult for a new transtor to understand what happen with the spaces and the $ without knowing how the rest of the strings are concatenated... Other examples are specific sentences in french for jokes or cultural references etc, etc...

2) I am the head administrator of Fallout Génération (http://www.fallout-generation.com) a french fallout website, that is present on the web since 2007 (previously fallout-3.com) and i am quite aware of permissions and private groups.. We are  currently organized in a non-profit organisation officially declared in France and we are managing many aspects of all the different groups that belong to our organisation with each of them have many members and many activities, virtual or physical. So I have absolutely no problem with managing access and who is going to have access or not. I think I am very much reachable for anyone who is interested in the french translation of Fallout and I am always happy to help people getting involved in the various translation projects.

3) I am personnaly involved in the translation of the restoration project since its first version. I was involved in the translation back in 2008. The hell, I have my own character in the game (!) and my own lines of dialog in the game because killap asked me to add some lines for the star wars encounter... (check eastereg.msg : 1410 !!) And then he he prefered to add the cheesy ones that he write for me instead of mines (I was supposed to be Governor Tarkin but whatever..). So I think I proved my dedication to this project since I am still working on it 15 years later...

4)  OMG Yes !! I would definitely prefer that, so that we could "lock" specific strings instead of locking the whole translation. I don't know if it's possible. I'll go check the docs.

5) It is possible but through the years I prefered dirrectly inform people working on it and training them while they are translating rather that maitaining a guide that would change with the different version of the game and the sfall version. We do have a nice glossary though and a very nice french wiki (www.fallout-wiki.com bigger than the french nukapedia)

6, 7, 8 thank you for the commentaries and for the suggestion I'll go throough the weblate docs to see whether would better suit our needs. I think this page would also help a lot about permission management : https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/access.html


I hope DoctorKain would join this discussion because actually we know that not so many people are working on this translation and maybe it's just a convenience measure. But what we ask (being able to lock the translation for specific people, at least during a certain perdiod, while we are working on the next release) it is to avoid unecessary corrections and unecessary verification on each modification on the history page while we are actively working on it.

Again, if it's too much pain in the ass for you, let's just go for the easy solution, I know we are all volunteers here and what you have done for the community is just amazing. I don't want to take too much of your time.
So after this lengthly introduction, maybe we could wait for DocteurKain ideas on the matter and please let's just discuss the technical possibilities that are currently available and decide quickly so we can all go back to work ;)

Yours sincerely,
HawK-EyE
 
Last edited by HawK-EyE on Wed Nov 17, 2021 2:57 am, edited 2 times in total.
HawK-EyE
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2021 1:23 am

Re: Locking part of the translation ?

Post by HawK-EyE »

What I have found in the doc so far :

Custom access control / Default Group and role / List of privileges
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admi ... privileges

(...) 
Component
  • Edit component settings [Administration]
  • Lock component, preventing translations [Administration]

Also the whole "Scope of groups" section is interesting : 
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admi ... -of-groups

 
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Magus
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Re: Locking part of the translation ?

Post by Magus »

1) I don't think sfall does anything at all with accents, as far as I know it's just a matter of having a proper font.

2-3)
HawK-EyE wrote: Wed Nov 17, 2021 2:29 am I have absolutely no problem with managing access
Maybe, but I do have it. Like I mentioned, you are not the first person to come with this request. @AL|EN made one too, and so far it wasn't granted, for the same reasons. If we start restricting access, then before you know, everyone will want their languages restricted.
If I do that, then it will become much harder to new translators to jump in. If I don't, then I'll have to answer questions like "hey, why @HawK-EyE gets to decide who's worthy, but I don't?". I don't want to do either.
So my point stands, written promises and transparent ground rules would be required if restricting an entire translation.

5)
HawK-EyE wrote: Wed Nov 17, 2021 2:29 am It is possible but through the years I prefered dirrectly inform people working on it and training them while they are translating rather that maitaining a guide that would change with the different version of the game and the sfall version
I don't think that sfall or game changes have really changed anything in translation flow over the years. Anyway, as you wish, of course, but I do think that a user-written guide could be beneficial.
(As you can see, I've written some guides and tips in this forum, but my experience may be skewed by having to admin the system as well, so I might've missed things that confuse newcomers, but are obvious to me).


4) I think there's review/approve workflow, which could effectively allow locking individual strings. But the issue is that version 3.1.1 on which we're on doesn't allow per-component permissions.
We'd need to upgrade, and that is blocked by this issue, which isn't even planned to be fixed. So, you know, feel free to comment and let the developers know that it affects you, bring other people to comment too, help convince the devs that it needs to be prioritised.
Please do not PM or email me about my mods and projects. Use forums. Also, see our talk channels.
HawK-EyE
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2021 1:23 am

Re: Locking part of the translation ?

Post by HawK-EyE »

I am sorry Magus, but yes the accent issues as well as many other were fixed with the development of sfall

https://falloutmods.fandom.com/wiki/Sfall
(changelog)
v4.2.7 (2020-08-22)
  • Added an option to use Fallout's normal text font for death screen subtitles
v4.0.5 (date unknown - v4.0.6 2018-06-24)
  • Added an option to use Fallout's normal text font instead of DOS-like font on the world map
The first one for accents in the splash screen and the second for world map accents.
Yes of course it is a font issue, but before sfall, it was just hardcoded in fallout2 executable and it could not be corrected anywhere else.

It has only been corrected in 2018 and 2020, thats a little more than 10 years we had this issue. So, yes, Sfall changed many things over the years, even in the translations... But actually who cares ? so nevermind.
4) I think there's review/approve workflow, which could effectively allow locking individual strings. But the issue is that version 3.1.1 on which we're on doesn't allow per-component permissions.
We'd need to upgrade, and that is blocked by this issue, which isn't even planned to be fixed.

One important thing : 
I don't understand how the issue you link is related to the upgrade of the software. You cannot upgrade at the moment ?


Anyway if this is not possible to review/approve at the moment, let's not change anything and close this issue.
We are going to handle the translation as it is.

Thank you for your time, take care
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