On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Bruce Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think I'll be leaving this team, not that I have done much work > anyway. > > My main reason is the fact that all of this work is for Ubuntu, and for > Ubuntu only. I don't like that situation, and saying as en_GB in GNOME > seems to be getting behind (95%), I will probably try to join them.
I can't say that I can blame you, Bruce. For over a year, we have been trying
to pressure the Rosetta people to better integrate with upstream projects. I
know that this is on their TODO list, but for whatever reason
(priorities/resources/difficulty/complications/whatever) the improvements
aren't happening fast enough.
Many translators are not very technically inclined, and Rosetta's gift to the
community is that it makes translating simple for those who can't be bothered
with technicalities like PO files. But if those translations can't be shared
with upstream, their usefulness is greatly diminished.
It seems like whenever a major import is done, it overwrites some of our own
translations, forcing us to reinstate the changes (and of course, we have the
find the problems first). I might not be understanding the mechanism
correctly, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
The strength of a translations project at the distribution level is that we
can operate on a wide breadth of packages and projects at once. Working with
GNOME only allows modifications to GNOME packages. Working with Ubuntu allows
work to be done with GNOME, KDE, Xfce and so on. It also allows us to
identify and address consistency issues across the applications. It is not
uncommon to see the same element or concept named different things across
projects. A distribution-level translation team can see this and smooth out
the differences, making for a more consistent user experience.
What we have been weak on is pushing those modifications upstream. As has been
already mentioned, Rosetta doesn't make this easy.
This is _not_ to say that we are ineffective as a team. What needs to be done
is better communications with and submissions to upstream, even if it must be
done manually at this point in time. Simultaneously, we need to keep up the
pressure on the Rosetta folks so that they improve their upstream
collaboration capabilities. If you're a coder, please pitch in and offer to
help them to make this into a reality.
--
"This is the Microsoft that ran roughshod over competitors in order to gain
market share at any cost. The Microsoft that forgot about customers in its
blind zeal to harm competitors."
- Paul Thurrott, WinSuperSite.com, 2006-04-19
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