Following the previous e-mails on this subject, I would like to add
some comments as a plain Launchpad Translations user and member of a
translation team, in the hope they can be useful for further
discussion.
I very much agree with the points brought up at the talk, as well as
with the additional comments from Kenneth, so I'll try not to repeat
what has already been mentioned. Regarding two of the four main
points,
* Sync more often from upstream translations into Ubuntu.
I find this very important, but not only the frequency would have to
improve, but also some other aspects in my opinion:
- Synchronisation announcements: It would be quite useful to know
exactly on which dates the upstream translations are going to be
synchronised (i.e. the start and end dates of the synchronisation time
window), which would help teams with a close relationship to upstream
to see e.g. which modules were committed after synchronisation and
probably need extra work at Launchpad. It would not have to be a rigid
entry in the Ubuntu release schedule, I believe an announcement on the
ubuntu-translators list would be enough.
- Review of the synchronisation mechanism: in our team (see the
explanation at the end of the message) automatic synchronisation seems
to fail quite often, and we end up with packages (in the case of
GNOME) which were completed and comitted before the .0 release but
they are incomplete in Ubuntu. Incomplete means here that there's a
considerable amount of untranslated strings, which for the most part
are not Ubuntu-specific, and therefore should have been imported from
upstream. Another common case we've got is that in some modules not
directly modified in Launchpad Translations, upstream corrections do
not seem to substitute old strings. That means for example that there
are modules in which new strings are imported correctly, but upstream
corrections to present strings do not appear in Launchpad.
My point is that this should also be an aspect to be improved, as I'm
assuming -I might be wrong- that this is also happening to other
teams.
Additionally, I would also like to see the daily langpacks coming
back. They were an invaluable tool for translators to check that the
imported translations were correct before a langpack release.
* Make it harder to customize upstream translations in Ubuntu, and
easier to revert from customized translations to the upstream ones.
I also agree with Kenneth's comment here: it would be nice that teams
with a managed membership and structured translation management could
lock upstream translations, and only let the Ubuntu-specific ones to
be edited. It would greatly simplify the translation process in those
cases.
Some other comments I would like to add (might not be directly related
to Launchpad Translations but to the translation process of Ubuntu):
- A central place with the complete documentation of Launchpad
Translations. That's again, in my opinion, another missing feature:
good documentation for this tool. New features are being continually
added, which are announced in the Launchpad release notes, but they
are nowhere else documented -or at least nowhere I could find them- so
it is quite difficult to keep track of them. There are a couple of
good overviews at
https://help.launchpad.net/FeatureHighlights/SoftwareTranslation and
https://translations.launchpad.net/+faq, but they are just that,
overviews, nothing that translators already acquainted with Launchpad
Translations can use as a reference or "help file". I know there is
the ubuntu-translators list, but I think it serves a different
purpose.
- Clear announcements of the frequency of langpack updates. If
translators know exactly with which frequency langpacks are going to
be released, they can set objectives and better organise the schedule
of translations.
And finally, I would like to complement the comments on the first
point (upstream synchronisation) with a particular example: the
current situation in our translation team, simply to illustrate some
of the problems we are facing. Note that I only mention GNOME as
upstream, as I am not very much acquainted with the coordination of
translations on KDE and XFCE outside Ubuntu.
Most of the members ot the Catalan translation team, including myself,
are also members of the GNOME translation team. This means that
translation of upstream modules are usually only modified at GNOME's
svn, and then in theory these modifications end up in Ubuntu after the
corresponding .0 release in the GNOME release cycle.
But theory does not seem to apply to our translations, and we seem to
find more and more of the following cases in GNOME modules from Ubuntu
main, were apparently synchronisation simply did not work:
- Incomplete translations in Launchpad after synchronisation, although
upstream modules are completely translated. Examples: Evolution,
Tomboy, xchat-gnome, ...
- Upstream corrections do not seem to make it into Launchpad (i.e.).
Examples: gnome-system-monitor, ...
Also, it is quite difficult to determine which modules were not
correctly synchronised. Sometimes we only get to know when a user
points out to an error via e-mail on our list.
We are a relatively small group, and even so we manage to keep up with
the translation of Ubuntu-specific packages, but the problem usually
comes from the upstream ones, which should be the ones to cause less
trouble. We have reached a point were we are spending more time
managing and fixing those modules than actually translating, and I
must say it can be very frustrating.
The status of our GNOME 2.20 translation is 99%, yet when it comes to
Ubuntu it just drops down. I do not want to be dramatic here, the
level of the Catalan translation in Ubuntu is more than acceptable
IMHO, but the point is that there is a considerable gap between the
upstream and distro statuses, so in our particular case Launchpad
Translations seem to be rather hindering us than helping us. We put a
lot of effort to translate and thoroughly review upstream, but the
results the users get downstream do not always reflect those efforts.
On the positive side, though, I must say that this contrasts with the
Ubuntu-specific or third-party translations, where the Launchpad
Translations web interface has evolved to a state where they can be
completed and reviewed in a very productive way.
In any case, those where my thoughts. I did not contemplate how
feasible the implementation of any of the suggestions would be, as I
do not know the inner workings of Launchpad Translations, and I also I
hope I was not too critical.
Regards,
David.
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