Talk:Translation Workflow

Transferring the Danish translations of the first batch of pages to the new framework, I came across a few oddities:

• In one page the ;) smiley was used inside a parenthesized remark. This resulted in the translation of that section to be marked as "out of date". Apparently the translation system keeps an eye on unbalanced parentheses. This is confusing for readers and translators alike, so I suggest that we encurage authors to avoid using smileys or anything else, that results in unbalanced paranteses.

• Sometimes a paragraph has an image or a snippet of code inserted with blank lines around the inserted item. In those cases the whole paragraph - blank lines and all - should be kept in one translation unit. The reason is, that in translating a paragraph, one does not allways translate sentence by sentence. Sometimes it is nessary to move things around a bit in order to make the text flow naturally.

• While I was translating the page on Kopete, the original was rearranged a bit. In particular, some sections were removed, and the remaining sections were renumbered. This had the unfortunate effect that some of the translated sections no longer matched the original ones. Even worse, the sections were marked as if they were current, so it is a bit a lucky stroke that I even noticed the problem. It seems, that we should not renumber sections after removing something or after inserting new sections. It should be OK to have translation units that are not consecutively numbered, right?

In order to understand what happened consider this example:

Let's say, that a page originally contains 10 translation units numbered 1 to 10. After I start translating the page, someone else modifies the original page as follows: some sections are removes - lets say units nr. 4 and 8. As I finish translating the (original) page and view the result, what I see are are translated units nr. 1 to 8 - in other words, the two sections removed from the original still appears in the translation while the last two sections are missing from the translation. --Claus chr 18:03, 9 June 2010 (CEST)