Sorry about the lateness of this reply, but here goes. On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 13:31 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > 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've changed my mind slightly, I'll stay in the Ubuntu team, but I'll only work on Ubuntu-only things in Rosetta. > 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. Fair enough, I was assured when I joined this team that work was being done in this regard, but I have seen no evidence of this. > 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. This is one major advantage of Rosetta, but I'm willing to learn the "proper" way. > 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. This makes a lot of sense, but it seems slightly wrong that all this work is only for one distribution. This is a very noble concept, but without upstream participation, all the work is (IMHO) pointless. > 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. I like the work the Brazilian Portugese team has done, see http://www.ogmaciel.com/?p=397 for details of this. I have signed up to the GNOME-i18n mailing list, I'll send an e-mail asking for advice on what to do when http://l10n-status.gnome.org/ starts working again. -- Bruce Cowan <https://launchpad.net/~bruce89/> -- Ubuntu-l10n-eng mailing list Ubuntu-l10n-eng@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-l10n-eng https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EnglishTranslation