This page documents the process used by the debian-l10n-dutch team to coordinate things, we pretty much copied the process of the French team (changing tag names to be more international).
The first thing to know is that all translation work is coordinated through the language-team mailinglist. So everybody that wants to help should subscribe to the mailinglist.
Mails to the mailinglist concerning translations use subject-tags (in square brackets) to indicate the state of the translation. The following tags are used:
- ITT
- Meaning "Intent To Translate"
- Sent to indicate that you plan to work on the translation, used to avoid double work
- RFR
- Meaning "Request For Review"
- Initial translation is done and, attached to the mail, or posted somewhere public, others on the list can then go over it to check for errors
Possibly followed by a ?RFR2 when substantial changes have been made
- It is a good idea to add '(x strings)' to the subject so reviewers get a rough idea about how much time will be needed to review.
- NOTE: send a reply if you checked it and found no flaws
- ITR
- Meaning "Intent To Review"
- Used to avoid LCFC's being sent when there are pending reviews out.
- Mainly used when you expect your review not to be ready for several days (because the translation is big, or you don't have any time before the weekend, ...)
- mail body should contain an indication of when to expect the review
- LCFC
- Meaning "Last Chance For Comment"
- Indicates that translation is done, change from the review process have been incorporated, and translation will be send to the appropriate place
- Can be sent when there are no ITR's, discussion following the RFR has ended and it has been 3 days since the RFR
- should not be sent before there has been at least one review
- As with RFR's it's a good idea to add '(x strings)' to the subject so reviewers get a rough idea about how much time will be needed to review.
- DICO
Meaning "!?DICtiOnary"
Used to indicate discussions about which terms to use in translations, translation style conventions, etc. A list of StandardTranslations is available.
BTS#<bugnumber>
- Meaning Bug Tracking System
- Used to register a bugnr once you submitted the translation to the BTS.
- Every day the l10n-bot will check if an open bug report has been closed.
- DONE
- Speaks for itself
- Used to tell the translation tracking system a translation is done (eg. added to package, webpage, etc). The prefered way is to use the BTS-tag, but for translations that are commited to cvs or sent to a maintainer directly you can use this tag.
Other proposals:
- NEW
- Meaning NEW possible translation
- the person sending it to the list considers it a good thing to have the indicated template translated
- The subject should name the template that is wanted to be translated
- The body of the mail should point to the place where the original should be taken from.
- REV
- Meaning review
- The mail contains a review of a translation
- Used to draw attention to the translator that there are comments regarding the translation
The subject of the translation is indicated in the mail-subject with a pseudo-url as follows:
- po-debconf://package-name
- Translation of questions asked by debconf on installation
- po://path_in_sourcepackage_to/po-file
- Translation of program interface
- man://section/subject
- Translation of manual page
- wml://adres_of_webpage
- Translation of debian web-page
A program parses these pseudo-urls.
Once translated and reviewed you should send in the translation as wishlist bugreport against the package the translation is for, when sending in the bugreport make sure that:
- you tag the bug both 'patch', and 'l10n'
the bug subject contains [INTL:<languagecode>] (<languagecode>=nl for Dutch)
you send a mail with the subjecttag [BTS#<bugnummer] to the language-team-list, so we can track the progress of the translation.