I’ve been having this issue for a while. There it is a master branch and a stable branch. Both updates at a pace impossible to follow.
Someone changes a colon or rephrases a sentence or changes one word and everything is marked as fuzzy again and again.
Many changes doesn’t add much or are immediately overwritten a day after.
There is no criteria.
I understand that it is like a wiki and several people are allowed to make changes. That’s great. But please update the master branch and only push to stable branch after the end of a cycle.
When you are pretty much content with the content.
Thanks.
That way is a lot easier to support a manual that everyone can read. Even if the latest version is not fully translated yet. Is better than not having a manual at all.
I see. If you already done this then nothing can be done about this.
It is what it is. A huge amount of work every few months.
That’s okay I’ll do my best.
It is (should be) writer responsibility to mark as done (and unfuzzy) trivial or typo changes to avoid force the translators to re-read or diff manually the sentences to see if translations are to be revised or not. So, to avoid the multilanguage un-fuzzy operation, a rule-of-thumb should be to commit only when changes are worth to be spread among the multilanguage translations;
There should be some documentation freeze time to allow translators to keep up with the translation;
Having said this, I prefer to translate the “always moving target” master repository because due to the really massive GIMP documentation, having to hurry up before the announced release date can, and usually is, a really daunting and almost impossible task to comply.
I regret having caused and still causing anyone “extra” work. I will be working more on the manual since it really is in need of some revisions and there are still parts of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 that need to be added to the manual.
Some changes may seem small, but they are all intended to improve the readability of the text and to adjust to changes in GIMP itself.
Note that the documentation writers can’t change the status of translations, since updating po files is all done on DamnedLies. As a writer I also can’t know if a small text change in English is also a small change in the translation.
Before we are ready to publish the manual for 3.0 we will announce a period of string-freeze here so that translators can work on it without having to worry about further changes.
Sometime after the 3.0 manual is out, we need to do more reorganizing of the manual to reduce the amount of duplicate text and less spread over different po files (e.g. the concept and using parts should be combined).
I do not want to judge if your statement is good/bad/wrong/right, I’d only like to express what you express is not aligned with how GNOME translations have been handled over the last 20 years: Basically, there has always been an understanding that “developers are not supposed to touch translation files”. (Which could be changed, of course.)
In my opinion the underlying problem is that there is too much documentation. Thus an outcome of too much documentation is that there is also a lot of translation work when trying to update incorrect/outdated documentation.