Continuing the discussion from Translating Bahmni:
FYI @janflowers, @michael
As part of the EndTB project, PIH, MSF, and IRD are imminently going to start translating Bahmni.
Thinking about this, it occurs to me that offering to let distributions do their translations under OpenMRS’s account in Transifex (rather than creating their own) can be win-win:
- the distribution benefits because it’s a potentially larger group of volunteer translators
- OpenMRS benefits because it brings more translators into the org, and they may stick around to translate other things
- each additional translated project under our org builds up the translation database which improves the suggestions that transifex makes
- If we follow this approach with more distros than just Bahmni, it will nudge us towards having consistent translations across different OpenMRS distros, which is a good thing (since Transifex makes suggestions based on other translations within the project)
(I haven’t looked at the details of how things work, so maybe there are downsides also, e.g. what if Bahmni wants a different set of reviewers for common languages than OpenMRS has, or the EndTB consortium wants to do all translations themselves, and don’t want community-sourced contributions.)
In the long run, I think we should be offering this benefit to distributions (though presumably we need some limits, e.g. maybe just “endorsed distributions” or something like that). And we’ll want to avoid going over whatever limit there is on the free Transifex tier we’re on.
For now I think we (ThoughtWorks + EndTB) will probably end up creating a Bahmni transifex organization in the coming days, and revisit the issue of moving translations into OpenMRS’s space in the second half of the year, once OpenMRS gets more organized about distributions.
That said, if others in this group think it’s okay to pilot this idea by putting Bahmni translations directly under OpenMRS in the coming days, we might want to try that approach.
