Translator

gtranslator is in need of an interface rework in order to make better use of space and improve the user experience.

Participants

Seán de Búrca (development lead)

Daniel Korostil (designer)

Relevant Art

Lokalize

Poedit

Virtaal

Gtranslator

Qt Linguist

Transifex

Discussion

Goals and scope

Goals

High level goals:

• Present a clear and intuitive interface for basic translation
• Allow the user to easily find additional information

Basic requirements:

• Navigate list of translatable strings
• Clearly mark difference between translated, fuzzy, and untranslated strings
• Display status of file (total number of strings, number of translated, untranslated, and fuzzy strings, and percent complete)
• Show comments about original string and comments about translated string
• Provide a path for the user to discover location of string in the code (does not need to be a part of the main interface)
• Pull in suggested strings from a built-in translation memory

Potential features:

• Terminology glossary

Non-Goals

• A comprehensive solution for fetching, translating, and uploading translations

Concepts

Project view

Translate view

Preferences view

Items

Guidelines

Comments

• I like a lot of the idea in these first concepts. I like the notion of giving the string its own frame with the ability to link various things to it, and the idea for marking translated/fuzzy/untranslated matches what I was thinking. I also like that the recent files concept is pretty much scrapped entirely. That said, there are a ton of PO files to work on for GNOME, and GNOME isn't the only PO-based project I work on. I think of projects more as different open source communities, each probably with its own translator profile. The projects could then contain packages or subprojects or something of the sort which were the individual PO files. This is a bit of a nitpick, but I'd also like to see more space given to the strings listing, since many strings are very long. I don't know that I need to see the whole string at once, but a bit more space to get an idea would be good. These are just some initial thoughts. Thanks for the work you've done so far. —Seán
  • Would it work to divide the space into three, like transifex does? String list on the left, editing in the center, suggestions and glossary (possibly can change between, like the top buttons used in gnome-music, etc.) on the right? I suggest this in part to allow for the creation of the glossary, but also because in thinking about the editing area, I realized that some languages (including the one I work on) may have numerous plural entries. I'd like to see how this would be handled. I'd like to see example strings, since with five plural forms it can be easy to forget which one is which.
• I think the current design is largely good. I'm not certain of the design of the project view, however. For adding and removing projects, I'd like to see something akin to the existing pattern used in gnome-music, gnome-boxes, etc. I'm not sure how this would work with the specific requirements of the projects/files division, though. Additionally, I'm not yet clear on how selection of a project, followed by a PO file, would appear.