[07:47] <andrejz> good morning!
[07:48] <dpm> hey andrejz :)
[07:48] <dpm> good morning everyone!
[09:03] <andrejz> Hello!
[09:03] <andrejz> I have a question
[09:04] <andrejz> Is there any  way to integrate custom word list into launchpad
[09:05] <andrejz> We thought it would be great to have some way to suggest recommended terms (common vocabulary) to translators automatically
[09:05] <andrejz> Has anyone thought about similar idea in the past or maybe even implemented it for their own language ?
[09:07] <dpm> andrejz, there is no standard way. What you can do is to create a project with the list of words in English, then translate them into Slovenian (or any other language) and take advantage of global suggestions in Launchpad: if you translate the words in this project, they will be shown as suggestions in all other projects in Launchpad. There was in fact a project created with this intention, but it is no longer maintained. Let me see if I find the
[09:07] <dpm> link...
[09:09] <dpm> Here it is: https://translations.launchpad.net/translation-standards
[09:12] <andrejz> Thanks for reply, dpm. I am aware of the global message sharing feature. But the problem is that all the messages (even the ones we don't have influence on, or some very old ones) are included in the message sharing.
[09:12] <andrejz> As such both good and bad suggestions are used
[09:12] <andrejz> Is there any way to make some suggestions prefered?
[09:13] <dpm> andrejz, no, but you can delete suggestions. What do you mean you don't have influence on them? Can't you delete bad suggestions or choose the good ones instead?
[09:14] <andrejz> I can use the good suggestions, but this is meant especially for new translators to help them learn quality translations faster, and if they have some good and some bad suggestions it's not optimal
[09:14] <andrejz> Is it possible to delete a suggestion so it's not dispayed as a suggestion anymore, ever ?
[09:17] <dpm> andrejz, it is possible, yes, you should be able to do it in the UI, but I'm not sure if they get deleted instantly or are cleaned up after a while (jtv? ^). In any case, suggestions are shown in order: first the ones actually used in other projects and then the ones which are just suggestions in other projects
[09:18] <jtv> dpm: what gets cleaned up?
[09:18] <dpm> jtv, to give you a bit of background, we're wondering if with global suggestions:
[09:18] <dpm> when you delete a suggestion, is it deleted immediately, or does it take some time to clean up?
[09:18] <dpm> i.e. until it stops appearing as external suggestion in other projects
[09:18] <andrejz> global suggestions use strings from everywhere, but some of those are not of good quality, so we would like to remove them
[09:20] <jtv> There's no such thing as deleting a suggestion.
[09:20] <jtv> They never get deleted.  We have enough trouble as it is on the rare occasions that we do want to delete one of those records!
[09:21] <jtv> But as dpm noted, accepting a suggestion elevates it to the status of "used elsewhere," which means it gets better placement on the page.
[09:22] <jtv> It might be worth cleaning up unused suggestions at some point.
[09:22] <dpm> jtv, so what does the "Use this translation and remove all suggestions" checkbox does, just delete the suggestions from the particular template?
[09:23] <jtv> Even less than that. :)
[09:23] <andrejz> for some strings there are several suggestions.. some are good (meaning in line with accepted vocabulary), some are not so good, and some are bad (mostly suggestions and translations from 2007 and earlier in our case, as there was no QA at that time)
[09:23] <andrejz> We would like to remove this old suggestions
[09:24] <jtv> It removes the suggestions made for that particular message _from the display_ of that particular message.  It does that basically by re-affirming the existing translation, so that the suggestions made there are considered "reviewed."
[09:24] <andrejz> or somehow made a list of terms, which would be preferentially displayed
[09:24] <andrejz> is there a way to achieve that?
[09:26] <jtv> Depends on whether they're "local" suggestions (i.e. suggested right there, for your particular translation) or "global" suggestions (suggestions that the system digs up from elsewhere).
[09:26] <jtv> The local suggestions can be dismissed like I described above; that's a change that's local to your translation.
[09:26] <jtv> But getting rid of the global ones only makes sense if they're unsuitable for _any_ use in that language.
[09:27] <dpm> andrejz, the preferential display already works if the suggestions are actual translations used elsewhere (they are shown further up in the list of suggestions). As per removing unused suggestions, I'll let jtv explain if that's possible
[09:27] <jtv> ^^
[09:27] <andrejz> jtv, we would like to do that, remove the global ones
[09:28] <jtv> That's hard, and undesirable if the suggestions may be of use to somebody else.
[09:28] <andrejz> because we now have an approved list of words, we will use in our translations
[09:28] <andrejz> both us, GNOME, KDE
[09:28] <andrejz> etc
[09:28] <jtv> It's a bit like asking google to remove search results you don't want.  :-)
[09:28] <andrejz> so we would like to encourage the use of that words
[09:28] <andrejz> through global suggestions
[09:29] <jtv> If they are completely and utterly broken (which happens too), that could still make sense of course.
[09:29] <jtv> But again, it's hard, and you'd need a highly effective way of identifying the bad messages.
[09:29] <jtv> The main thing that springs to my mind there is to remove ones that are in the wrong script for their language.
[09:30] <jtv> Global suggestions are basically search results.
[09:30] <jtv> However
[09:30] <andrejz> Not necessarily remove them, just to make the agreed ones higher in the list
[09:30] <jtv> I'm currently working on an experiment that might address this in another way.
[09:30] <andrejz> that would be good enough i guess
[09:31] <dpm> jtv, btw, what's a "local" suggestion? One suggested from elsewhere in the same template one is translating? I didn't know that this existed
[09:31] <jtv> (Technically it could be very hard to rank global suggestions for the page you happen to be looking at—they are already relatively difficult to gather)
[09:32] <jtv> No, a local suggestion is where somebody came to that specific message (in that specific template or now, one that shares translations with it) and entered a translation.
[09:32] <dpm> jtv, oh, I see, thanks for the clarification
[09:32] <jtv> That is what translators do.
[09:33] <jtv> If you maintain a separation between translation and review, as Ubuntu does, a translator is any user who knows the language.  They enter translations, and those go into the system as suggestions.  They are "local" to where the user entered them.
[09:33] <dpm> jtv, yeah, I understand, I was just not familiar with the "local" term
[09:33] <jtv> OK
[09:33] <dpm> We do review all strings like that
[09:34] <jtv> andrejz: anyway, the experiment I'm working on is to present a "here's what an automated translation looks like."  We can then train the translation software on examples from the same context (assuming it's a big one such as Gnome, KDE, or Ubuntu as a whole) so that it will tend to use the same terms.
[09:35] <jtv> Of course we could only do that for a very limited range of projects and languages—it's hugely expensive to do and requires lots of reliable example data.
[09:35] <jtv> Some of the translations are worthless, though a surprising number come out better than human translations.  :-)
[09:37] <andrejz> Sounds good. In our case there is this huge difficulity that translations are NOT the same (even though the string is the same) if they are at different places in the program (for example a menu item, a tooltip, title of a dialog window all have different translations - endings of the words)
[09:37] <andrejz> So in our case this wouldn't be so useful
[09:37] <jtv> Well, that's a reviewer
[09:37] <jtv> 's job
[09:37] <jtv> To look at the alternatives and see which ones are acceptable.
[09:40] <andrejz> yes i agree. for old contributors it works great. but new users often don't know what to choose and it sometimes greatly confuses them. Also we would like to introduce this agreed set of vocabulary to other translators (those who are not a part of language group)
[09:40] <andrejz> if i undestand correctly
[09:40] <andrejz> the more one term is used in translations, more likely it will appear as a suggestion
[09:41] <andrejz> so in the long run mostly good strings will remain, but we were wondering if there is a way to accellerate this process
[10:18] <jtv> andrejz: I'll have to leave soon.  But one note: a translation that is suitable for one project may not be suitable for another.  So you'll always see some strings that are used in another project, and are perfectly good for that project, but not for yours.  The reviewers must be aware of the standards and select based on this.  I don't see any good, easy way to achieve this.
[10:19] <andrejz> ok, thanks for good discussion, i learned a lot about shared messages :)
[10:19] <jtv> The experiment I mentioned is one way to approach it for a limited subset of extensive, well-managed translations.  We're using Dutch Ubuntu translations for the evaluation.  If you're interested (and Dutch isn't _too_ much of a problem :-)  then you're welcome to join the discussions I'm hoping to start about this soon.
[10:19] <jtv> Cya!