Diverging translations of package description/summary

[humdingerb]

Say the description of a package has been translated for v1.0. A year later, out comes v2.0 with a changed description. The translator doesn't realize the description has changed, leaving the translation outdated.

[andponlin]

Thinking about this, there are three issues here;

• The underlying text has changed in the HPKR and so the localized text is still old.
• The people who are localizing are not aware that the change has happened.
• There is no versioning of the localizations.

I guess one way to solve this is stop logically linking the localizations for the text to the packages themselves. Instead use the source text from the HPKR as a key into a translation table; perhaps by hash. I guess that would solve this problem and is more like how Haiku's localization works.

There may be some opportunity to get some cross-pollination with the main Haiku localization tool which might help get such a change made.

[humdingerb]

You mean to use something like Pootle? AFAIK our Pootle is barely maintained, so that way may not be viable. Also, with pootle there's the problem that if a string changes, all the old translations are thrown away, and you have to translate that string from scratch.
In that regard, the user guide translation tool is a bit better (though equally barely maintained...). Here the outdated block is marked "fuzzy", and you can compare the outdated translation to the new English original. That's good, but it would be even better if you could see what has changed in the English original...

Anyway, I suppose @KapiX would have more usable insights on this topic due to his Polyglot experience. I think he's also looking into this already, but was concerned about scalability and performance when it comes to thousands of packages...