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Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

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Corné Aussems, modifié il y a 10 années.

Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Liferay Legend Publications: 1313 Date d'inscription: 03/10/06 Publications récentes
Hi guys,
While working ourselves blind to meet the deadline we find many translations that do not match the english version and the key.
The texts indicate that they have been translated in the past, because they are proper dutch but are not or partially related to this specific key.
Somehow this translation was automagically put there.

For example look at the key "select-version"
Note the dutch and german translation are wrong (spanish already has been improved)
http://translate.liferay.com/pootle/nl/portal/Language_nl.properties/translate/?unit=735487


The text is originating form the key "delete-version"
http://translate.liferay.com/pootle/nl/portal/Language_nl.properties/translate/?unit=502619

These are detected because they were marked fuzzy, I hope all these magically translated files are fuzzy so all of them are detected.

Subtle difference in subject;
http://translate.liferay.com/pootle/nl/portal/Language_nl.properties/translate/?unit=725073
http://translate.liferay.com/pootle/nl/portal/Language_nl.properties/translate/?unit=784634
http://translate.liferay.com/pootle/nl/portal/Language_nl.properties/translate/?unit=681524


Note 1: Olaf removed nl locale from autotranslation
Note 2: @Olaf i wish you lots of success finding these keys in your git translation process ;)
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Daniel Sanz, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Regular Member Publications: 143 Date d'inscription: 14/12/10 Publications récentes
Hi Corne,

as part of the work we did to overcome this pootle bug, we had to patch pootle. When a new update from master is being running, if we detect that the english meaning of the key has changed, then, instead of messing the translation (reported in the bug), we keep the original translated value in the target language, and mark it as fuzzy so that translators have a chance to locate it and change it if needed. You can find more details here

This is the solution we achieved to avoid the buggy, pootle behavior: set the translation to the old english value.

This has nothing to do with auto translation tasks made by ant build-lang Liferay feature. Those auto translations are never uploaded to pootle during the update process.

Regards,
Daniel.
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Corné Aussems, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Liferay Legend Publications: 1313 Date d'inscription: 03/10/06 Publications récentes
Hi Daniel,

I do not think we are on the same page.
We did not see english keys that had been changed, we saw keys that were newly introduced and Pootle copied over an approximate already translated key and then changed the 'subject' in that sentence.

This i also discussed with Julio and according to him this has been solved too.

I essence i think most translators opt rather for an untranslated text than a wrong translations.

We always check out the 'matchnames', otherwise we can't reach 100%, so this was more or less an alert to those (Olaf) that don't.
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Daniel Sanz, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Regular Member Publications: 143 Date d'inscription: 14/12/10 Publications récentes
Hi Corne,

the issue you mention about apparently auto translated keys may be related to the one we fixed, but is different. That's the reason I menioned this, because that key messing could have set the conditions required for those supposedly auto-translations. We fixed some of them in Spanish as well.

Pootle provides a Machine Translation facility but we don't use that in our installation. So I tend to think that those automatic stuff came up either as a consequence of the bug we fixed (prior to fix it), or as an independent pootle bug or as a result of our patch (because of the fuzzy marks which we implemented).

However, I fully agree that desired behavior is to leave new keys blank for all languages on each pootle update. I mean, each time we add new keys to pootle, those must be empty so that we can traverse them.

I'll take a look to the examples you mention to check if they have to do with any of the stuff we know about.

Regards,
Daniel.
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Daniel Sanz, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Regular Member Publications: 143 Date d'inscription: 14/12/10 Publications récentes
Hi Corne,

I've found a possible reason for the behavior you describe. It's about a well hidden pootle 'feature' called fuzzy translations for which there seems to be little or no documentation at all.

All I was able to find is in the pootle source code, where this mechanism seems to be triggered when updating the stores.

I'm not sure if our current sync process uses any pootle management command that makes use of that function, but I can't tell until I can take a more deep code analysis. In the past, we used it, so it's likely that those translations appeared long time ago and remained for some time there. As far as I can tell, the ones we fixed for Spanish are ok since we corrected them.

This apparently weird function seems not configurable as far as I was able to know. If I can find a way to confirm this is the root cause, I'll find the way to disable it, even if I have to patch pootle (again).

Best,
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Jonathon Omahen, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Junior Member Publications: 31 Date d'inscription: 28/09/09 Publications récentes
Hey everyone,

I've been fairly silent, because I simply haven't been able to dedicate time to the translation effort, but I have been lurking here and there. emoticon

The "fuzzy translation" feature Daniel mentions is not exactly a well-hidden feature. In fact, most people familiar with the software toolkit that Pootle is based off of are well aware of this capability. The base implementation, the desktop software package Virtaal, includes this feature as part of the training process for translation.

The intent is that, in many use cases of professional translation, the software keeps a record of commonly (or previously) translated words and phrases. This is, of course, to aide in the translation of new texts. When encountering source materially yet untranslated, the base library will attempt to find close or exact matches to words and phrases within the source text. If found, it suggests those as fuzzy translations, providing much better ground to start from (in many cases) than an automated translation.

When working manually, these suggestions pop up in the software as options, but do not fill in automatically. However, using Pootle as well as an automated process of extraction may be accepting the fuzzy translations for untranslated keys.

Thanks everyone for the work you do! I only commented since I've used Virtaal quite a bit, and this feature comes in quite handy in many instances. If, however, it is a nuisance to the automatic build process (which I imagine it is), then you should wholly disable it.

Cheers
Tschüß
Later
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Daniel Sanz, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Regular Member Publications: 143 Date d'inscription: 14/12/10 Publications récentes
Hi Jonathon,

thanks for your quick input. I believe this (not-so-well-hidden, but apparently undocumented) functionality is the root cause of this. We often update pootle with new keys which have to be translated by contributors. In this process, I guess that if a fuzzy translation appears as a suggestion, it will be welcomed by most translators. They can always ignore it.

The issue comes when those ones are automatically set as actual translations (marked as fuzzy, but actual). The pootle sync_stores command copies them into the resulting java property files, being impossible, from that time, to distinguish if they are auto-translations generated by pootle or real, human verified ones.

As a result, let's take a real Spanish example, where hte key "feed" was auto translated as the nearest one, "feet". As a result, the web content management page in the control panel, told users that they can edit web contents, structures, templates and feet.

So, since you're a Staff member, I'd suggest to talk about this privately, then push the results of our findings/decisions here for the community. Sounds it ok to you?

My screen name is daniel.sanz.

Regards,
Daniel.
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Jonathon Omahen, modifié il y a 10 années.

RE: Automatically and wrongfully translated keys

Junior Member Publications: 31 Date d'inscription: 28/09/09 Publications récentes
Hey again,

I completely agree as to the root cause. We can certainly chat and see what easy solution there might be for this. Pootle (Translator Toolkit in general) has pretty underdeveloped support for Java properties files, so quirks such as this are somewhat common, unfortunately. emoticon

Cheers