Re: Translating Gnome with launchpad.net

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 12/31/08, Danilo Šegan <danilo gnome org> wrote:
> Hi Christian, Mikel,

Good to hear from you!


[...]
>  >>  My question is if we can have an asturian translators team for Gnome in
>  >> launchpad and, in that case, we have to submit the translations to bugzilla
>  >> or launchpad it's synchronized with svn.gnome.org?
>  >
>  > Launchpad is for Ubuntu only.
>
> That's completely false.  However, for all practical purposes, people
>  are _usually_ talking about translating Ubuntu in Launchpad.

I and many others know that Launchpad in theory is indeed very much
agnostic. However, that doesn't matter much when that's often not the
case in practice, and that there at the same time appears to be a
never ending number of volunteers that mistakenly believe that there
is some sort of automatic synchronization back to upstream gnome.org.
Yes, I gave him the short, practical, answer. Don't blame the messenger.


[...]
>  > If you translate in Launchpad, only Ubuntu will automatically benefit.
>
>  Depends on what one calls "automatically".  If you translate in
>  POEdit/Gtranslator/Kbabel nobody will automatically benefit (not even
>  your own computer where you did the translation).

I believe most people understand the difference between a simple local
editor, and an online tool. I guess you will hard time to find any
person expecting a local editor to automatically distribute his or her
work in order to benefit the world. On the other hand, I have
witnessed many such (often mistaken) expectations with an online tool,
especially when discussing Launchpad in specific.


>  Launchpad is a
>  better PO translation tool than those in that it allows better
>  collaboration, and at least something (Ubuntu) is going to use your
>  translation right away.

Indeed, but...


>  For upstream projects (like GNOME), translators have to understand
>  that they have to manually submit files upstream (i.e. to commit).
>  That's no different to the new Vertimus/Damned-Lies combination,
>  except that Launchpad is more powerful (unfortunately, also
>  proprietary, but not for long).
>
>  Launchpad has never let anyone translate GNOME projects in Launchpad
>  unless they understand these terms.  That's why there is a GNOME
>  Translators group where only upstream translation teams are allowed
>  when they confirm they understand these rules.

Excellent, and I applaud you for that!

However, last time I checked there was still better support for some
languages in downstream Launchpad than in upstream svn.gnome.org.
There could be many reasons for this, but obvious reasons could
include that those volunteers either do not understand the concept of
upstream and downstream and the need for contribution to upstream, or
that they choose to ignore those issues, or worse, simply do not care.

Either way, as long as there is any language or volunteer where this
still applies, I think that's one too much. I think it's a sad waste
of scarce resources if contributions do not get generally used, when
it would have been so little extra work needed to get them generally
useful for everyone.

I do not want to contribute to any mistakes and and waste of
resources. Therefore I try to keep the message simple: If you want to
translate GNOME, translate it in svn.gnome.org.


Christian