Add German language to l.d.o

Uhm, why ignore http://drupal.org/project/de and all the existing work?

We maintain the German core translation at http://code.google.com/p/drupal-de/. Unfortunately, this wasn't mentioned on the project page, I apologize.

The German translation team used such a server before, but unfortunately this lead to several problems. There are still a number of problems with the l10n module that need to be solved before moving to localize.drupal.org:

• Apart from a small icon, translators don’t see that there are already suggestions; it’s way too easy to ignore the fact that there are already 3 suggestions
• The maximum number of open suggestions for a string can’t be limited (this lead to 15-20 extremely similar suggestions per string on the previous server)
• There’s no way to comment rejected suggestions, making it impossible for the reviewer to give feedback to the translator
• Translations can’t be marked as “stable” or “golden”; see http://drupal.org/node/251327
• If you have permission to review suggestions, you can also accept your own translations (inhibits peer review); see http://drupal.org/node/220119
• It’s horribly complicated and requires many clicks to accept a translation; the interface for reviewing is not very user-friendly
• The difference between the current translation and a suggestion aren’t visualized. This makes it extremely complicated and frustrating to review because you have to figure out the differences by yourself; see http://drupal.org/node/563128

I don’t want to say that the l10n module is a bad thing (on the contrary, I’d love to use it), but as long as these points aren’t addressed, I don’t think a new try is worthwhile.

I'm definitely the kind of module maintainer, who is happy to acknowledge the holes and deficiencies in his modules (code, UI, workflows, processes, etc), and is ready to help integrate fixes. I think I've supported the above ideas where I've seen them pop up in issues.

You link two existing issues, and I'd add the #527300: Tools modules (may have some reusable stuff) issue which also includes some code suggested for a "suggestion approval" focused UI. (For your point before the last one).

It would be good to file issues for the others, and especially if we can find people to help fix these issues. It would be good for the German team but eventually for each team on the service. I'd love if this service can be more agreesive with fixing and adding features then project module on drupal.org and therefore I've opened a public request for help in developing tests (#560132: Write tests), so we can commit the existing performance improvements which change quite some of the schema and then focus on more feature development. That would encourage people to contribute, since it would be way easier to touch given the automated tests ensuring that existing functionality keeps working.

I think I am more then open to all these requests, and I'm trying to ensure a sustainable future for this service and for the underlying module. But I obviously need help, because implementing all these is an immense task.

#563128: Rework the translation UI

@snicers: I think lacking features is a valid reason for certain teams to not join localize.drupal.org immediately. Lack of easy tools for moderators might make teams waste more time moderating then setting up and maintaining a separate server. However, I'm also in favor of centralized teams, and I support those saying that random translation servers might not carry on your work, so you might pour your contributions to a black hole. (They might broke, disappear, get hacked, etc and get lost without a backup). Ultimately I'm not keen on going against key people in a community, so let's try to work on some of these features (and automated testing to help get these in). Some languages resisting to join might actually help accelerate the development of these features I believe. An abandoned translation team is worse then a late starter, and German would not be a late starter still by any means. We still have lots of languages waiting in line.

First of all, I can't decide "for the community". I guess I've become a kind of semi-official maintainer of the German core translation, but I wrote the previous comment as a personal statement and not as a "translation lead". Again, I think it would be absolutely great to move to the translation server, but given our previous experiences with that software, *I think* the *core translation* shouldn't move to the server without the issues resolved.

I'd welcome it though, if the contrib translations move to the server. The problem I see though is that many contribs use core strings as well, so we'd still need the core translation on that server (and I don't think there's a way without it being modifiable).

Yeah, the whole idea of the localization server is to share strings among modules, so *not* translating a project on the server is not a possibility.

An announcement at Drupalcenter.de is at http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/21120. Perhaps Konstantin can get Björn to publish it on the Frontpage.

Done!

There are now patches for all four of the most important feature requests. I think after we get them in and deployed on localize.drupal.org, we can finally start moving the German translation to the server!

Oops, there's no patch for stable strings.

There is none.

I've worked a lot on adding tests at #560132: Write tests and to add mass-moderation and user filtering functionality #570648: Add mass moderations screen for suggestions (+ user filtering) (all of which was deployed recently on localize.drupal.org, see http://localize.drupal.org/node/117), something that exactly members of the German translation team mentioned as important to be able to use the UI for moderation of suggestions. That does not save us fixing the translations UI for suggestions, since it is just a mass-moderation focused UI, so I still believe we should work on fixing the suggestion display in ways Konstantin outlines.

To get the ball rolling, I would like to suggest "Drupal-Initiative Germany" (http://drupal.org/user/587318) as german "master" account.
The people behind that non-personal account are to 90% the same as the active translation team and talking with each other.

That doesn't mean, that people must be part or member of "Drupal-Initiative Germany" (http://www.drupal-initiative.de/), which is the official Local Drupal Assacioation in Germany.

+

You should reconsider, because as I see there are no critical problems with suggestions and approval any more. If there are trusted users who are willing to maintain the translations then why do you want to stop them..

Re-factoring of UI with the golden feature is still missing and this is more than critical. Here are the blockers from my point of view:

#563128: Rework the translation UI
#251327: Flag translation as 'golden' vs 'need work'
#220119: Permission to "approve other suggestions only"
#226243: Allow marking translation as suggestion

It is hard to improve something if you are not using it..

We used it in past and it was nightmare after a very short time that made us taking the German translation server down.

kkaefer, a very few others I cannot remember all by name and me. We are the German core translation team. I've made the most reviews in past for DE core D6 and we have all been overwhelmed by thousands of suggestions for strings that do not need work at all - often 10-20 for one English string. Most of the strings waited in queue a long time an many many people *complained* why we do not approve them. Well we haven't for the reason that the strings were buggy, bad, not good German, "Sie" form, etc. There was no way to comment on bad strings and what needs work... therefore I have read many hundreds strings every week again and again only to figure out they need work. The rework will also bring the important DIFF functionality what makes reviews also much much easier. Our time is very limited and we cannot waste 90% of our spare time only for re-reading all strings every day again and again.

The workflow, status and other things off the current server are not usable for production! If this few major issues are fixed the server will be a great tool for all of us.

You may also like to take a look to my profile to see how many and what other projects I translated. Most important are CCK, Views, Panels, etc.

Changing the title as this issue was not listed from the l.d.o wait list link.

It's a correct translation for "View" and "Views" like many others, but I know that a few do not expect this translation - what nevertheless do not make it worse. We also translate Book and others menu entries to German. This is OT here... :-)

I would expect that in a translation all the words are translated. I know that in some languages the English words are kept, but that is not the correct way to translate.

Only as a side note - the ubercart translation have many bugs and the maintainers need to take a careful look to the Core dictionary and translation. There are many wrong translations inside... My feeling was there is also no real *active* maintainer... the reasons must be the same like here :-(.

I'm busy, but I really hope Gabor and Kkaefer will take the time to bring the 3 top issues in #24 into fixed level as soon as possible - better soon than later... :-)

Go on... Work on the permission and UI patch and we are finally done :-)))

@KiamLaLuno
I disagree:

in a translation all the words are translated

and as you say yourself, other countries disagree too.

There are many English words used in today's German language - and those literal translations are the reason why I just say NO WAY to using the German version of Drupal. A translation is not done word by word. It is more complicated than this. That's why it has still to be done by humans.

We are an international group and even Germans have to know some English to work with Drupal. Those words are called "Fachwort" = technical term. When we translate even the names of core and most used modules how will people be able to talk?

As to the rest where and when I do not understand what is going on, besides that there are some people who are eager to help and feel frustrated.

@Confetti: we need to be able to transate everything, nevertheless some english speaking people think we don't need. It's a decission of the translators. We are also able to just copy the english word as is, but we are also able to translate if it makes sense. I also have given many examples in a different case that microsoft and other company product names are also mostly translated into german. I have often read that products cannot translated - this IS wrong!

Translating views and view makes sense! Only for the reason that d.o don't give search results for german keywords is no strong reason not to translate. This is an english only portal. Please keep this in mind.

I could be wrong, but German language seems to not borrow words from English; it's not like in Italian, where you can hear people saying look, drink, or other English words while speaking in Italian.
It is rather true that English has taken many loanwords from German, often without any change of spelling (blitz, gestalt, abseil).

It is also true that using an English words in another language is often a decision of who translate; also Italian borrowed the word blitz, but there is still also another word that can be used instead of that one.

I guess you are looking for this issue: #152375: Implement translatable module names (with context)
and just to make sure nobody is correct: "William Tell" is "Tell Vilmos" in Hungarian, "Julia Roberts" is "Julia Robertsová" in Czech.

@snicers: Please stop complaining! Provide patches for views (and after this patches are committed - views translation patches). It is usable for sure, but have a few issues we need to work on. I also know there is something to do. "Views" translatable strings are nightmare! Have you ever taken a look into the strings??? I have translated many many modules and core, but I have never seen such a bad basis like views. I doi not like to complain to the maintainer about this, but we need to to a USABILITY and deep string review to make all strings SELF explaining and context insensitive. They are currently very context sensitive and expect deep technical understanding and this makes it really impossible to easily translate like tons of other projects.

I worked so often on the strings in past, but we still need to do a full review again before wasting time again + we need to make views themself translatable (still impossible).

@Earl Grey and the others not worked on the German translation server in past and complaining here again and again:

Core translation is OK, not perfect and the reason for the most bugs - is the translation server we have used for some time in past! You may not like to understand the reasons, but I know how bad it was and how many weeks I wasted. If you would have 20 translation suggestions per string and all are *not* acceptable you may start understanding what I'm talking about if you need to maintain 5000 strings that needs work. The translation server with all modules will add 150.000+ strings and we need to manage them. If you guyes are able to provide patches for core translation we are happy to review them, but we need to keep the barrier higher for now (SVN) than in past (open l10n_server).

We have seen some good approvers in past and some bad. It wouldn't help us if we have again an open system where all people join to provide tons of suggestions that are not acceptable and we are not able to mark them with NEEDS WORK or/and commenting why they need work and what need to be changed. And we need to lock gold stuff. Plus we are not able to search for suggestions that needs review minus needs work status. We cannot read every day 150.000 strings again and again.

Module name / product name translation example is at http://drupal.org/node/152375#comment-2109822

i would help translating

Whats the current state of this project? Is there any progress getting German into localize.drupal.org? We are currently evaluating to run our own localization server, but we would prefer to share our efforts to the community instead of another separated solution.

To discuss this personally, one of the main topics of "Drupal-Initiative Sprint" (http://drupalcamp.de/node/1073) is "Drupal auf Deutsch" ("Drupal in German").

@narres: Meinst Du ihr bekommt die fehlenden Patches an dem Tag fertig - wäre cool! Hoffentlich verirren sich nicht noch mehr hierhin, die sich nur beschweren und mehr oder weniger überflüssige Diskussionen vom Zaun brechen, weil sie die Komplexität der Verwaltung und des Workflows in l10n_server in dieser großen Umgebung nicht vollumfänglich verstehen... :-)

Well while we all still complaining and open one issue after the other in one topic, why dont simply stick to the first need:

- We need a proper german translation -

Well yeah, there are issues on that road. But other languages started already, living with the fact that the language server needs some improvement.
So please dont stuck on simply discussion one point - leading to the next point. Yes a project needs to be well thought, but this is totally overdone.

So what i suggest is, letting the german language added to the translation server. Then WORK on the issues that server has, while TRANSLATING the language and COMBINE the number of authors on one server.

We have _so_ many pending german translations which are not part of a release yet. And this wont change to fast.
So please focus on combinng already done work - centralize them on the localisation server and keep moving on.

Endless discussions do not lead anywhere, but we germans again are one of the best teams out there not able to get productive and stick all the heads together.

I suggest choosing some project-leads: kkaefer, slicers ( great work !!), and Thomas_zahreddin(massive work on module translation in the near past).

@hass: you "proper" _auto_ translated "translations" are making some plugins _unusable_. Please stop that. Keep them english before providing german translations which makes completely no sense.

@And to the consultats: Pay the translators some respect. Fund some money! Nobody likes sitting 30 ours in front of strings, translating them for the whole community! This _is_ boring. But drupal far behind in germany, compared to typo3 or joomla. One of the main reasons is the lacking of a proper translation.

Funding work here _will_ improve your sellings!

@EugenMayer: What the fu**'n hell are you talking about? Are you trying to annoy me now here for the reason that the private way was unsuccessful? Do I really need to introduce myself here only for your? You should *really* make your homework yourself first.

Until you know anything about my work (and you understood the GPL), my continuously and HARD work on uncountable German translations - don't comment on anything of my work, please. Your are completely wrong. I'm the one who have *not* approved bad translations and have not passed only half good translations into core for the only reason that we are not able to mark them as fuzzy for later review/re-translation and I'm really sorry for all the good suggestions I missed for the reason that the others overwhelmed the approval process. I'm pretty sure that I've already contributed more than 20.000 strings until today without counting them all. It's only fair to say that I may have added a few buggy strings, or typos, too - but until one of the complainers here can give us such a history - stop complaining, PLEASE. If you find bugs, *provide* patches, but do NOT complain! Nobody is perfect and I do also rewrite some strings sometimes 10 times or more before they are fluent and good. This translation job is not easy as many modules have very buggy strings and much of the work goes in reviewing modules translatable strings and get them stable and fixed before the translation work should start. Only take a look to my profile and you *may* get an small idea what I've translated. I'm pretty sure that CCK is one of my best translations over all and the maintainers of CCK, Date and many other gave me always positive feedback and are thankful for my reviews. kkaefer also told me more than once "that my translations are really good".

As I understood your comments - you have spare time to work on #251327: Flag translation as 'golden' vs 'need work' and #563128: Rework the translation UI? Go on and fix them, but again do NOT complain anywhere if you use others work without spending your own time and energy. Do not waste your time with writing comments.

PS: I never ever have used the suxxx Google translation service for anything.

Go on and fix them, but again do NOT complain anywhere if you use others work without spending your own time and energy.

That one i really like!

Until you know anything about my work (and you understood the GPL)

That one i like next! If you know about the GPL, what about this : http://drupal.org/node/650862 ?

Well yes, your a nice guy. And you really dont need to introduce yourself, people seem to know you pretty well, as i recognised.

--
Did i complain about the UI? Did i complain about the server? Did i comment as much as you do?
Did you even read the comment?
--

Part of the reviewing process are mainly the quality checks, typos, wrong translations, etc. :-)

For the reason of missing "needs work" flag, strings with not so good quality may have been approved by someone who may have not seen the quality issues or thought - we can "fix later" (but we cannot as we do not have a "fuzzy" marker, see #226243: Allow marking translation as suggestion)... A fuzzy flag would allow us to approve strings that may be good, but not excellent quality translations... otherwise we need this "needs work" to mark them, but this would not show them in the translations exports as they are not approved.

Your approach is in general a good idea, but will slow down the process dramatically for the reason that you need to find a 3 person. Gabor have said some time ago that this is no good diea - at least not for less popular module projects. The idea was not to overcomplicate the approval process into tooo many approval steps. For the reason of some incidents in past where someone approved his own very broken strings the "approve own suggestion" has been added. This feature has been comitted short time ago #220119: Permission to "approve other suggestions only", but is still incomplete #652038: Migrate permissions to og_user_roles, instead of our own code.

The main issue we currently have - is we cannot mark a string that is *not* approvable (quality issues, typos, wrong translations) as NEEDS WORK. Therefore we are not able to get this stuff out of our eyes and we are totally lost in the system that still shows you strings that "needs work" and you need to read them again and again as you think they are *new* and *waiting* for approval. If you read them sloppy you may not see bugs and then you have what we have.

In a long discussion (also in recent times, as this thread shows) the german community voted for a translation-team-leader.

See
http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24217
http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/23568
http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24128
http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24169

so i have the honor to lead the team.

So the german language can be added to l.d.o :-)

All persons on this thread thank you for your support in the past - lets rock l.d.o :-)

Only with a closed team! No public suggestions, please.

Approve: hass, kkaefer, zahreddin
Suggest: FrankT, snicers, tobiasb, spade, others...

Only with a closed team!

We have already had the case of the Japanese team; I am not sure we want to experience another similar issue.

What are you talking about?

Hass i would please you to use the right platform to discuss what you just stated above. You are not the one to decide on ( of course iam also not the one ). We try to give this a community driven touch, so please refer to the http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24659 thread.

Just state your question / sorrow there. Let people discuss alltogether and dedcide. Here Thomas will present our results and facts, we all worked out together.

Thanks (iam sure iam not the right person to please you kindly, but please dont read between the lines. My bid here is a bid. No need to take other topics into this fields, i hope you agree)

@kiamlaluno: maybe you ignore #61 and keep on with installing the german language on l.d.o. We will sort out about the issue hass is arguing about and will "come back" with it later (if needed)

We can easily create a language team, but I'm not 100% positive that the debate is over. Let us know if you consider this as the "final thinking" on how things should be done.

@kiamlaluno: I'm not seeing how this would be similar to the Japanese team's situation. Here, we seem to have a person who was voted team lead via a community discussion / selection. Let's consider each issue on its own ground, thanks!

Did anybody from http://www.drupal-initiative.de/ chime in? They have a translation server too (http://localize.drupal-initiative.de/).
There have been just a co-maintainer of the German translation project who chime in, and he didn't agree on moving on l.d.o.

If there is no way to have a closed group and we are able to receive 10.000 suggestions for golden strings... and we become overwhelmed in very short time like in past.

@Gabor: There seems a handful of people (most not experienced in l10n_server and previous tries + no idea about anything we learned in past) who seems to have had a discussion and started a voting somewhere nobody of the current maintainers monitoring anything (drupalcenter.de). I was never aware of any voting until today. #61 is the list I suggested earlier, too and with whom we can start. But over all we need to be able to block OPEN suggestions. If this is not possible -> postponed until the "Golden / needs work" patch gets in... any chance for a CLOSED group we manage ourself?

@kiam: There is no other German official server - only private installations - often for single projects. The official German translation is ONLY on Google.

@hass: the current permission control scheme on localize.drupal.org is explained at http://localize.drupal.org/node/616

"translation team member"
This role is granted to all members on joining the group (and existing members were already granted this role). A team member can submit suggestions, import and export text.

Bad news, this group is automatically assigned.

Very crazy... *import* permissions by default... everyone could import Turkish into Hungarian very very often... Someone have imported Turkish into our German server in past... no good idea to have this on by default! Do you have the roll back scripts next to you? I could give it a try and show you...

You can revoke this permission manually from anybody anytime. It is indeed assumed by default that this role is provided. I'd love if og_user_roles would support configurability of group default roles per group, but it does not support that. You can try and talk to @sun. The current global default support was introduced in #519794: allow group admins define default role for new members with a note that it does not allow per-group settings.

roll back scripts

/translate/languages/de/moderate
Filter: Submitted by: someone
Select all (max 30) > Decline all selected

@Pasqualle: Do this with 10.000 or 50.000 strings, please. kkaefer removed over 3000 wrong suggestions from the database in past of the suggesting user who have cluttered the German suggestions... afterwards all statistics have been wrong and so on and so on. Also don't forget users importing bad translations every week for the reason you have declined them and they think they like to try again and again and again...

@Gábor: Are you able to create a group with read-only permissions, please? In this way it sounds like we are able to override the default role for new members per group as stella said in the intro of #519794: allow group admins define default role for new members. I'm sure there are other groups that may like to default to read-only permissions by default, too. Only keep in mind someone who like to clutter your l10n server can create new accounts, clutter the site again and again. You cannot block such users...

Do this with 10.000 or 50.000 strings

just create a new issue: Project: Drupal.org webmasters; Component: Localize.drupal.org

users importing bad translations every week

create a wiki page where you explain the problem

@hass: I tried to explain this clearly, but seemingly did not succeed. We are now using the og_user_roles module for user role assignment on joining a group and becoming a group admin. I can either set ALL groups on localize.drupal.org to hand out certain permissions to users upon joining any group, or I can set ALL groups on localize.drupal.org to not hand out any permissions. I cannot set the German group only to not hand out any permission. I'm not going to assume all groups would like to pre-aprove all their members (but prove me wrong if that is the case), so I set it to automatically let people contribute when joining a group.

You can lobby the og_user_roles maintainer, get someone write a patch, organize reviews, etc. to get a per-group default role assignment feature in. As @stella mentioned, it would be a good addition. I think it would be great, because I could give groups more control / flexibility, but it is not in the critical path for l10n_server, and this module has lots of stuff in itself to fix/improve, so I'm not tangling into working with og_user_roles. I'd love to deploy such a feature, but it needs development in the http://drupal.org/project/og_user_roles module. Let me know the issue number so I can provide my support for the feature.

Actually, I could just tinker with the OG group node settings itself and set up a pre-approved group via the OG node. That is basically up to group owners to tweak anytime anyway.

For all involved Persons:

Please add your points and your vote on
http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24822

For english speaking persons:
Every german spoken person is invited to add arguments to the discussion and to vote on each topic.

(So everybodies arguments are heard and we get the opinion of the most persons).

Hallo webmasters,

I'm happy to pronounce, the results of some polls (= links) pronounced at http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24822, preceding thread was over 3.000 times viewed and has nearly 100 comments http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/23568 .

+ we want to establish the German translating group (vote http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24823, unanimously)

+ we want to move translation guide for Germans and related material (like glossary) to l.d.o (http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24824)

+ we want to close the group (after an initial open phase, during that people can join) to establish the proceedings and open after a few month the group more and more, see http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24825
4 votes for a start with a closed group and opening it later
4 votes to go with a totally open approach (wiki-style)
no comments in the poll,
so i think all should be able to accept to start with a closed group, which will be more and more open.

+ we have 5 votes for only a formal version (German: 'Sie') and 8 votes for also an informal version (German: 'Du'), so i suggest to start with the formal version (which both groups want), establish the proceedings and then open another group (or however this will be called) for the informal version (http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24826)

for your information: a poll for the planed activities of the users at http://www.drupalcenter.de/node/24827
shows out of 40 there are 15 persons willing to spent at least 1 h per month and 17 other persons willing to spent at least 1h per week for translation, only 1 person does not want to spent time and 7 persons want to make suggestions form time to time.

so i hope we have all in place to establish the German group :-)

Best Thomas Zahreddin

Thank you Gabor,

Bogofilter put your mail to the spam folder :-(
(switched to spamassassin)

So we agree that the group can be opend now :-)

Thank you for your support.

Best

Thomas Zahreddin

We still need the Golden needs work status

Dear hass,

thank you for the point.

All, or at least the most, are aware of it.

We have taken this point into consideration, it's all documented in the above (eg #78) comments.

You (as everybody else) are invited to send a patch.

Btw: there is no need to adress one point again, if the discussion and some polls are done - i do not see the benefit of repeatedly pointing out what is missing, when this point was discussed and a (organizational) solution for this was found. Maybe i missed something?

Best
Thomas

Ending up with cluttered translation server, useless suggestions is a real deal breaker as explained again and again over and over. So just wait until this is ready and the new UI is deployed, please. Don't waste valuable time of translators and mainly *approvers*, PLEASE.

Hass: Stop vandalizing the issue queue or I'll take great delight in blocking your account.

@Gerhard: I only try keep my hands around my work for not becoming cluttered. Have you contributed ~30% of the ~40% missing German D6 translation?

Sorry for nagging again:

http://www.drupaletics.de/drupalcamp-essen-27-bis-28-februar-2010

^ is the announcement of a germen meeting with 100 drupalers awaited, also translation is a big issue - do we have a chance to get the group until then?

best
Thomas

100 people may be there, but only a very few for translation stuff. thomas, You still have not answered my email

Created team at http://localize.drupal.org/languages/de and made Thomas_Zahreddin the initial owner / admin.

Please expect that there might be bumps in the service. You are among the beta-tester of this live instance. Thanks for helping out and please report issues as you find them! Your team members can now join and help import existing translations and work on more translations.

Anybody can sign up for being a member of the team and they will be able to submit suggestions right away. The initial admin can change permissions of people signing up, widening their capabilities. See http://localize.drupal.org/node/616 for explanation on how.

Welcome on board!

Gabor: Grant me manager permission too, please.

@hass: you know we have permission delegation so you can just go to the team manager with your requests.

Thanks Gabor for arranging that group.

@hass: You are by far the most ridiculous person a i have ever seen arround this project.