As an engineer, unlike a scientist, I'm happy with solutions that deliver demonstratable benefit. The proof of the value I add is the reduction inthe number of errors or the increase in productivity.
After attending the Mozilla Summit I remain convinced that moz2po continues to add value. When talking localisation to people using the Translate Toolkit we talked about translation quality, QA, etc. With anyone else I found we spoke about technical QA, by technical QA I mean fixing things like broken builds, screen sizes, etc., i.e. all the things that should be eliminated not documented or improved.
In my discussions with people about moz2po I picked up two memes.
For the first issue I must agree we cannot prove anything. Except what I can prove is that we don't make broken builds and when we do we fix the tools and no longer make broken builds. I don't need to watch tinderbox or the dashboard as I'm pretty sure all our data is correct. But I did get thinking and decided that at least for DTD files we could attempt to parse them and measure their validity, see bug 470, this is fixed and will be in v1.2 of moz2po.
For the second Imust admit to those unfamiliar to how we process PO files the use of & seems problematic. For those unfamiliar with DTD or XML you need to understand that & has special meaning in those formats so a stray & can break things. Then why did we chose & in our PO files? Simple, Translate.org.za translated KDE before Mozilla so we chose & which is used as an accelerator marker for KDE applicaitons. Even though we use & we don't see any of the breakage that everyone fears. Why? because I regard this as technical problems that should simply be eliminated. We eliminate them in two ways:
If that is not enough I've opened bug 471 to review the & decision, perhaps change it or at least make it configurable. But what I would like you to consider is the amount of time technical intervention has saved users of moz2po:
So the toolkit eliminates a whole raft of issues that you just never see. How much time have we saved over the years? Days and weeks I would guess, not only for us now but for many others who come later. This means that we can focus in areas where focus counts, the actual language used and future translators can do the same.