My first team project with OmegaT

On 21 May 2013 a student from Heidelberg University offered to help with the translation of the user's interface of OmegaT into English. She was told that we could make this a team project since I was already working on the translation of the complete manual.

Setting up the project

There are two ways to "host" a team project, one is called SVN (abbreviation for Apache Subversion, a software versioning and revision control system distributed under an open source license) and the other one is called GIT (British English slang for a stupid or unpleasant person). The "makers" of OmegaT seem to prefer SVN, though in other places (such as installing and updating MediaWiki GIT has taken the place of SVN.

Opposite to GIT SVN needs an administrator to set up the project. Unlike them the members do not have to know much about SVN. The student in Heidelberg and I were told that someone would set up the project. What we (or at least I) were not told was what Samual Murray has written in an excellent article on the platform ProZ on 5 January 2013.

"If you are a translator, you should have received a project URL from your team leader (OmegaT calls this the "Repository URL"). You also need a username (and password). Before you begin, create a folder on your computer that has the same name as the team project (this is to prevent you from accidentally downloading the project files without the top-level folder, which would be messy)."

In the first place I had to ask for the URL, but without a username and password I had several unsuccessful attempts to download the project. Later it turned out that a username and password had been sent to another e-mail address of mine, but there it had landed in the "spam" folder.

Yet the German version of OmegaT (version 3.0.0 and 3.0.1) did not download the project, although I used the correct username and password. Only when I launched OmegaT with an English interface I was able to download the project. After that I followed the steps described in an e-mail:

1. use OmegaT to access the team project online
2. once you have the team project downloaded on your computer, create an /auto/ folder in the /tm/ folder and put your existing TMX data in it
3. put all the source files you intend to translate into /source/
4. reload

After the download the folder /auto/ was already there. I also populated the /source/ folder. On reload the program said something like "synchronizing project". The student was told to do all steps except for 2. In the meantime I know that she downloaded the localization project for OmegaT version 3.0.2. However, if you read the How To: HowTo: Translating OmegaT into your language you get a link to download the full package for version 2.6.3. Having had difficulties in finding the compressed file for the latest version I have made both, 3.0.0 and 3.0.2 available for download

• OmegaT_3.0.2_L10N_Full.zip
• OmegaT_3.0.0_L10N_Full.zip

For all those who have not downloaded a team project, here is what Samual Murray has to say on that:

"Once you've created that folder, begin the first-time download of the OmegaT project by using "Project > Download Team Project" in OmegaT. In the first dialog that follows, select "SVN", and paste the project URL into the "Repository URL" field). Then use the "..." button next to the Local Folder field to browse to the folder you created on your computer for the project. In the second dialog fill in your username and password for the SVN server. OmegaT will then download the team's project files to the folder on your computer. When this is done, you may exit OmegaT, or start translating."

Working on a team project

Afterwards you can open and use the team project just like any other project in OmegaT. Whenever the project is saved OmegaT detects which segments are newly translated on your computer, and uploads them to the SVN server, and at the same time OmegaT detects which segments on the SVN server are newly translated (by other team members), and downloads them to your computer. Only the "project memory", that is /omegat/project_save.tmx is synchronized.

Well, this is the theory. In practice I always got the message "Local translation not sychronized with project repository. Project will not be updated" when I opened the project. The coordinator for localization told me that this was just a temporary behaviour that would change. In my case I discovered that although here and there "project synchronization" appeared in the lower left corner actually nothing was synchronized. Since I did not get an answer from the coordinator I wrote this message to the group stating inter alias:

I could work on the project as usual. I was not asked for a user name or password any more, but each time I opened the project the message "Local translation not sychronized with project repository. Project will not be updated" appeared. In addition, I could not see any changes anyone else could have done to the project. Only when I downloaded the project on my netbook (Windows 7 and OmegaT 3.0.0) I could see changes of someone else, but not the changes I had made to the project. They could only be included by putting the TM of the project under Ubuntu 12.04 in the "tm/auto" folder.

The answers I received were not very helpful. The coordinator for the development of OmegaT mainly said: "I don't understand what you want, the project behaves as usual" (on his part, presumably under Windows) and then asked me to commit source files to the project. However, he did not tell me, how that was done. Neither did the coordinator for the localization who pointed me at tutorials on SVN to find out myself. I told them that I wanted to make translations and not learn new technologies (operating SVN from the terminal).

The only thing I did was another attempt to download the project to a different location. My attempts by launching OmegaT as usual with a German interface failed and when I launched OmegaT from the command line I got the error message "Warnung: Falsche Authentifizierung (TEAM_WRONG_AUTHENTICATION)" (not displayed in OmegaT itself where it kept saying "checking project" until I stopped the program after half an hour. I had a last attempt using the omegat.kaptn script. I gave the location of Java as /opt/omegat/jre/bin/java, told that the OmegaT.jar file of the downloaded version 3.0.3 was to be loaded: /home/user/Downloads/OmegaT3.3/OmegaT.jar and made a deliberate choice of English as the language for the interface.

I had tried a German and a Turkish interface before. In Turkish a got an error message that I did not "record" and in German it once again kept saying "checking project". The difference with the English interface was that the "empty" folder that I had created was not accepted for download saying that this "folder exists already and is not empty". Therefore, I used the option to create a new folder and, this time the project was downloaded. After I had put the necessary files into the "source" folder I was able to see changes of other team members for the first time. Again it said at some stages that synchronization of the project was done. However, when I closed and opened the project again the same error message appeared as before: Local translation not sychronized with project repository. Project will not be updated.

Some strange behaviour

Once I had downloaded the project and populated the necessary folders with data (in particular with the /source/ files) my statistics suddenly changed. More segments appeared than in my original project. This may be due to the fact that the segmentation rules for simple German (DE) are different to the ones used for German in Germany (de_DE).

Parallel to this the spell checker did not work any more. I had two choices: either I changed the properties of the project from "DE" to "de_DE" as the target language or I renamed (copied and renamed) the files of the dictionaries (I had only dictionaries installed for de_DE). I changed the properties of the project and after reload the spell checker would work. However, after each new start I had to change the properties again.

Although during the translation I sometimes noticed that some kind of synchronization was done it said "Local translation not sychronized with project repository. Project will not be updated" when I started the program again. I was told: "Once you save the data once after that, everything is synchronized and the alert won't appear unless there are unsynchronized modifications again. In any case, this is only a temporary alert."

I am not so sure about that, because when I decided to download the project again (first I had put in a folder with a different name), my latest changes were not included. This happened in particular with the text for the licence that should remain in English and having marked the option "target may be equal to source" I had gone through more than 600 segments by repeatedly hitting "Enter" to mark the segments as translated. This change as well as the "search and replace" script that I used after I had deliberately left "Ctrl" (Control) untranslated to replace it with the German "Strg" (Steuerung) were not included in the freshly downloaded version.

In addition, several segments turned out to include tag errors that I had eliminated before. These segments would show once I hit "go to next untranslated segment" (Ctrl+U), but would not show when I used Tools > Validate Tags (Ctrl+T), where in fact it did not even say that no tag errors had been detected.

Points to clarify in the updated manual

After I discovered discrepancies between my translation and the English manual version 2.9.9 I changed the files in my source directory with the files that had come with OmegaT_3.0.0_L10N_Full.zip. In many cases the term "folder" had been changed to "directory". More important were changes were the "old" text referred to Java 1.5 (now Java 1.6) and to version of OmegaT 2.6xx (that had been changed to "3.n.n"). Yet, there were still some points to clarify (including mistakes) in the English version:

• File "About OmegaT" (introduction)
  • no space after comma "The user interface,Main Menu"
• File "InstantStartGuide"
  • The two images are unnecessary (can be written as text) and the second image is wrong (only closing no opening tags).
• File "Installing and running"
  • The last bits on launching OmegaT from the command line etc. were added to version 3.0.2. They may be helpful to some people, but are rather "disturbing" (optical) details for the average user. In MediaWiki it is possible to hide portions of text with the possibility for interested people to make it visible. I have used that option on the German page Download und Installation as well as the English page Download and Installation and on a number of other oages. It would also be possible to make these details part of the "talk-page" (discussion).
• File "The user interface"
  • "use this if the text you are translated..."
  • "you may can..."
• File "File Filters"
  • The box "Enable project specific file filters" should at least be put in quotation marks
  • Punctuation and sentence order should be improved: "Always (default), Only if (X)HTML file has a header, Only if (X)HTML file has an encoding declaration, Never"
  • No space between "Edit...and use "
• File "Working with formatted texts"
  • Image 12.1. and the text underneath (should actually be 12.2., but the first image was not numbered) does not correspond to the current settings in OmegaT
• File "Searches"
  • The image 15.1. referes to a rather special situation of searching for regular expressions. It could be a better idea to show an example using wildcards.
• File "spell checker"
  • The first image shows a valid URL to a source for dictionaries. The URLS on the HowTo page on spell checking however has a number of dead links. If there is no long-term address for dictionaries one should either provide them at a permanent address or instruct people on how to search for them...
• Appendix "Team project"
  • Many things are explained and illustrated that are only useful for administrators of projects set up under SVN. GIT does not need an administrator and has replaced SVN in many places (such as MediaWiki). In the German translation I have hidden the section for administrators using SVN and did not make any screenshots in German. I would prefer, if someone explained how to use GIT in OmegaT.
• Appendix: "LanguageTool"
  • The image in this file does not reflect the way LaguageTool "behaves" in recent versions of OmegaT