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[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Sent to you by Tom Hoffman via Google Reader: Sharing translations via
Launchpad blog by Matthew Revell on 5/5/11

It’s incredible to think that more than 57,000 people have used
Launchpad to translate software from English into their own language.

Many of them have worked directly on upstream projects, such as the
OpenShot video editor. Others have helped translate Ubuntu packages of
software. And then there’s a whole group of people who translate
upstream software outside of Launchpad.

Today we’ve taken another step in bringing those efforts closer
together by making it far easier to get upstream translations directly
into Ubuntu.

We want the strings produced by translators working directly on
software projects, whether in Launchpad or elsewhere, to be easily
available to the Ubuntu translators and we believe it should be just as
easy for software projects to take advantage of the work of Ubuntu
translators.
How it works
Translation sharing between different releases of a project, or Ubuntu,
has been available in Launchpad for some time now. Also, sharing
translations between an upstream project translated in Launchpad and
its Ubuntu package has been helping to bring those two communities of
translators closer together.

What’s changed today is that strings from upstream projects who make
their translations outside Launchpad are now just as easily imported
and ready for use by Ubuntu.

Now, so long as the upstream project is set up in Launchpad to do this,
a change made in an upstream project’s source code — whether hosted
directly in Launchpad or elsewhere in Bazaar, Git, Subversion of CVS —
will be available to Ubuntu translators just a few hours later.

Previously, Ubuntu took translation templates and files from the source
packages as they were uploaded. There was no automated route for those
new upstream translations to get into Ubuntu after that initial import.
In effect, this allowed Ubuntu translations to diverge from upstream
during the six month Ubuntu cycle.

This change has a nice side benefit of making it easier for upstream
projects to make use of translation work done for Ubuntu, because the
English strings will diverge far less and it will be easier to spot
where the Ubuntu community has done new translation work, rather than
their being a divergence due to the two efforts drifting apart.

To start with, this is available for projects that use intltools, which
includes all of GNOME. To get your project’s translations automatically
imported into Launchpad, see our help guide.

Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Launchpad blog using Google Reader
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