Application for Russian locale proofreader at translate.gitlab.com
Hi!
I'd like to take part in the Russian translation of GitLab as a translator and a proofreader. This page says I should open an issue here, so here's the issue.
TL;DR:
There's already a huge "codebase" of GitLab docs in Russian, with an established glossary and style, which differs from what's on translate.gitlab.com. Changing terms on this stage is yet possible, but hard. Let's discuss things carefully, make decisions, and strictly keep to them afterwards.
CV
I develop documentation tools and write docs in English and Russian. I'm also a devoted GitLab user since 2015 – I use it as a git remote and a CI server at work and host my personal homepage with GitLab Pages.
Since 2015 I've been a reviewer in the Stack Overflow in Russian translation team. It gave me experience with maintaining style and terms in croudsourced tranlation.
Since August 2016 I've been a part of a team, translating GitLab release posts and other important docs in Russian for Softmart, an authorized GitLab reseller in Russia. This job was started by @inem and is now continued by us. Each of the 24 translated posts has 5 to 40 thousand views, with 8 tips, intro to GitLab CI and GitLab Flow being the most popular.
Established Glossary for GitLab Documentation.
I strongly believe that many Russian-speaking users first learn about GitLab features from the translated blog. Lots of GitLab-related terms are introduced and consistently translated in all posts and people have already got used to them. In fact, this blog is the current GitLab documentation in Russian, however incomplete and not maintained by GitLab itself.
As a tech writer, I'm sure that for any product it's an absolute rule that terms should be consistently used and translated throughout documentation and user interface. Otherwise, customers get confused, which results in non-bought licenses and wasted time of tech support.
To keep translations nice and consistent, we maintain a glossary and a style guide, and always peer review each other's work. Each used term we've carefully picked, considering translated books, common practice and style guides of major companies. Throughout the different git-related products and sources, term translations are already inconsistent. They probably will never be completely unified, but at least we would like to have them consistent in everything related to GitLab.
The Problem with Current Translation
My concern is that many terms already are translated differently in our glossary and at translate.gitlab.com, and sometimes even within it. Some of the existing term and string tranalsations seem outright wrong to me – I've already commented and raised issues there.
If different terms will be used in the translated UI, we shall have to revise all translated posts to keep them consistent. What's worse, a number of users shall have to re-adapt to the new translations.
Of course, there are some grammar mistakes and wrong translations on the translate.gitlab.com, but that's not much of an issue by itself. It happens in any translation and is absolutely common for crowdsourced translation.
My Motivation
I must apologize for reacting so slow and breaking in so late. I definitely knew that the croudsourced translation was going on (as I'd translted the post), but didn't find time to join and share my point of view. To compensate for that I'd like to contribute by taking part in revising glossary, developing the translation style guide, and proofreading the already translated strings.
I also apologise if I seem harsh in comments at translate.gitlab.com. That's because I see that we already have issues with translation, things will get worse, and that's partly my fault, so I'm a little stressed.
People, who helped me with translations and may have an opinion: @inem @innerwhisper @blackst0ne, @softmart.