Launchpad itself

Language group help

Asked by Yannick Warnier

Hi,

I find the concept of language groups confusing for different reasons in my own specific case.

I've been leading a free software project (web software, e-learning context) for more than 8 years now, and we have our own base of translators, but for a few reasons, we want to "upgrade" our translation platform and one of the possibilities is Launchpad.

However, having a translators base of more than 50 people (it's actually more than 500 but some are very inactive), I'm trying to find a way to make the move to Launchpad easy.

I've created our project on Launchpad, imported our existing translations manually (.po files in a .tar.gz format) and now I'm trying to figure out how to allow people to contribute to the project's translations but still maintain control over each language and be able to assign the people that were previously (in our translation system) in charge of a language as "reviewers".

I cannot really use the "Launchpad translators" group, because:
- it doesn't seem to have a particular focus on education software, which might generate some bad quality strings
- the management of the individual teams that are assigned to each language is not clear (for example, the Spanish Launchpad translators team has 7 active members and 229 proposed members https://launchpad.net/~lp-l10n-es)
- once I assign this team, the authority to decide if a translator cannot translate for our project (because his/her translations are not up to our standards) would be delegated to the team admin, whom I don't know, and the process there isn't quite clear either

To us, the quality of translations (at least in our 5 most-translated languages) is very important.

As far as I understand, in order to gain more control on all that translation process, I would have to:
- create a translation group (or ask someone of the launchpad team to do so)
- create one team for each language
- assign people to each team (based on the translators we have in our previous platform)

Is that correct?

Is that something that would be allowed here? (I understand there might be some rejection based on the idea that one should avoid the proliferation of new translation groups and make it possible to more easily share translators between projects)

I would honestly be happy with a possibility to simply assign *people* as translators, one by one, to our languages, but it looks like there is no way to avoid the group concept for "approved translators". Is this correct or did I miss a button somewhere to assign translators to a language in my project directly?

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Данило Шеган (danilo) said : 		#1

As you can see on https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups, it's not really unheard of to set up your own translation group (though someone on the Launchpad side would have to do it and give you the admin privileges).

"Launchpad Translators" group is a good choice for anyone not having already an established translation team (similarly, "Ubuntu Translators" is a good choice for applications designed to be included in Ubuntu or any of the variants), because it defers translation group management to people who are already dealing with this.

Whether you want to create teams yourself, let language "owners" create teams so you can assign them as per-language teams in the group (the difference being that they will be able to add or remove users, but you can also appoint them as administrators for a team that you've created), or assign individuals as per-language coordinators is up to you and your project rules.

Note that you can still have an "open" translation model where everyone is allowed to submit *suggestions*, and only members of the teams assigned through the translation group are "reviewers" able to approve those translations.

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Yannick Warnier (ywarnier) said : 		#2

Thanks, that confirms a bit what I was understanding. The very small number of translation "groups" frightened me though... I thought, given the usefulness of having one's own group, that there would be hundreds of groups.

At least you seem to confirm that it makes sense for me to ask for the creation of a group.

I'm open to an "open" translation model, as you mention, which I understand to be the "Structured" model. Thanks, I will ask for an admin to do that for me then (not sure where to ask but I should be able to find that out, I think there was a link in the documentation to do just that).