Translation workflow

[thoni56]

As a (fairly) active translator it would be helpful to have a better understanding of the workflow from translation to producing the book, posters and website.

I'm at this time focusing on the guide so here's what I think I have found out, or guessed (in addition to what's described in the translation resources):

1. When a new "release" is made, all English strings are uploaded to Crowdin from this repo (s3-practical-guide), so at any particular time the English strings in Crowdin matches the latest "release" in this repo, right? But as there are no GitHub releases here (and the tags are not consistent either), I'm assuming that the actual release is HEAD on the release branch. As of this minute the config/project.yaml says that the version of the guide is 2021-09-22, and translations should have a version of 2021-09-22-<language>-<translation version>.
2. You need a repo (or at least the structure and files as hinted at in the translation resources) for the language you are translating to be able to build a PDF or ePUB in that language using the scripts and mdtools. (I've been able to do that for Swedish, thanks.) Then what? Is a "translation lead" supposed to commit the translations to that repo (in a PR if required), or is that done as part of the "release process" for the guide? How does a new translation then enter the actual release? (The Swedish translation is not near 100% yet, so just thinking ahead...)
3. It might be good to know that crowdin download will only download the translation files that has been included in a "Crowdin build", which seems to correlate with the latest release. So you cannot build a proofreading version with your latest translations of the guide using them. Instead you have to download each file separately (which is a bit of a pain, some scripting can help).
4. Is the Crowdin build done as a part of the "release process", possibly before downloading everything from Crowdin, then committing those to the language repos, and then building the various translated guides, websites, etc?
5. What about the Crowdin project "S3 Website", is that outdated? No commits in 4 years, and there is the website directory in this (and the translated) repo.

Just hoping to better understand the release process to be able to better contribute as a translator ("lead").

Happy to take any corrections to the above and perhaps some of it can be merged into the translation resources.

Just to make this a bit more visible, I'll mention @bboc, here.

[bboc]

Hi @thoni56, sorry for the late reply. I just merged you pull request for the translations, and I'm in the process of setting up the website to display the Swedish version.

Regarding the translation process:

• I typically tag releases when we make a substantial enough change to be mentioned in the changelog, and sometimes I tag maintenance releases where I fix some markup or typos (adding a letter to the version number).
• I used to handle all releases myself, downloaded the translations and updated the website and pdf. But since I am pretty slow doing that, we experimented with the French version and gave out write access to the repo, so they can update the website without having to wait for me. I'm happy to give you write access to the Swedish repo, too.
• Time and again I something to the renderer (mdtools), and then I need to go in and update the repo, which I will have to do for the Swedish repo, too, because I made some breaking changes with the latest update.
• there is a way of downloading everything from crowdin in one go even if it's not completely translated, I upgraded you to proofreader for the whole project, can you check if that helps?
• the website is entirely outdated, I'll remove that from crowdin.

[thoni56]

Hi @bboc, almost two years later ;-)

As things go, the time spent on various project vary so I've not had time or focus to return to this until now. I've completed the Swedish translation of the current version and will try to proofread and push that over the holidays.

• I used to handle all releases myself, downloaded the translations and updated the website and pdf. But since I am pretty slow doing that, we experimented with the French version and gave out write access to the repo, so they can update the website without having to wait for me. I'm happy to give you write access to the Swedish repo, too.

Write access to the Swedish repo might be helpful.

• Time and again I something to the renderer (mdtools), and then I need to go in and update the repo, which I will have to do for the Swedish repo, too, because I made some breaking changes with the latest update.
• there is a way of downloading everything from crowdin in one go even if it's not completely translated, I upgraded you to proofreader for the whole project, can you check if that helps?

I tried crowdin download ... but I get " You need to have manager access in the project to perform this action ". So I don't know if I'm missing something in my crowdin.yaml or if this is just not possible.

Also I tried the download/upload button on the Swedish translation page, but "Download translations" is dimmed out.

I really would like to be able to build a local version of the website and docs before doing a PR.