Launchpad itself

Prevent accidental overwrite of translations

Asked by Chimel

Miro Launchpad French translations recently got replaced by Galician translations for Limewire, and people started translating the new string resources into French soon after, leading to a wrong PO file with some French translations on top.
http://bugzilla.pculture.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17887

Is there a way from preventing this from happening, or at least require confirmation for such major changes?
I suppose for instance each translation resource is individually tagged with a language ID, since the translations are shared across products, so it should be easy for instance to check that the individual language ID matches the global language ID of the file or table you are about to overwrite.
The product ID could be checked too (in this case Limewire vs. Miro).

This looks like a bulk replace of a whole PO file or translation database table. In that case also it is easy to block the overwrite operation if the number of changes is too important, or at least require a manual confirmation.

In any case, it would be great to display or log the changes in the translations so the incident can be easily traced and rolled back.

There are of course other checks to validate the language as well, but they would require linguistic experts for each language, so these are out of scope.

If you have any suggestion about what happened to Miro and how to restore the French translation, feel free to edit the Miro bug 17887.

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This question was originally filed as bug #813841.

Revision history for this message
Deryck Hodge (deryck) said : 		#1

There may be a bug or two in here, but this seems more of a series of questions. Someone with more translations knowledge can link to the appropriate bugs that we know about or spin off this question into one or more bugs as we understand better.

Revision history for this message
Данило Шеган (danilo) said : 		#2

The easiest way to stop this from happening is to make sure only French team can modify any French translations, which is quite simple: use at least "Structured" for the translation permissions on the project instead of using "Open" permissions.

Still, it's likely that a single person who did this by mistake is part of both French and Galician teams, so the above wouldn't stop it from happening.

We could develop a bunch of heuristics (such as you suggest) to check that the PO file is of the appropriate language, that it's not changing too many things etc, but some of them would be quite hard (even if interesting) problems. Unfortunately, at the moment, we lack the time to work on these because we have a bunch of other important problems to solve first. If you or anyone you know is interested in giving us a hand with that, we'd be most delighted to share a few pointers on how to best start on it and how to get it integrated into Launchpad (Launchpad is open source, and basic pointers can be found on https://dev.launchpad.net/).

Sorry that I couldn't be of more help for this particular issue.

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