Getting key languages over the 80% translated level

[Timo Jyrinki]

2009/9/30 Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com>:
> Ubuntu is already available in an impressive collection of languages
> that we consider complete enough for general use. This includes
> *Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, German,
> English, Hungarian, Traditional Chinese, British English, Russian,
> Dutch, Japanese, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Catalan, Korean, Polish,
> Portuguese, Basque, Greek, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Galician* and
> *Asturian*.
...
>  * Finnish - 61%

I am absolutely certain Finnish is very complete for general use, and
much better in some important/visible ways than maybe 50% you listed
above (eg. app-install-data which is very visible, and it's still easy
to miss visible GUI strings of which I've seen many examples in other
languages). The reason is Launchpad which is broken especially in case
of some (random) languages:

You know what's generally said about statistics, but Launchpad
translation statistics are very twisted and plain wrong. For example,
a huge amount translations (10% or more?) are in OpenOffice.org Help
templates - however, if done in Launchpad, these are never used, and
furthermore there hasn't been imports to them lately, despite the fact
Finnish eg. has almost 100% of OOo help translated (Launchpad shows
0%, 100% for some others). Scribus is a 3k broken template which is
100% translated to Finnish but is shown as 0% in Launchpad, 100% for
some others. Etc etc.

Similarly, there are many huge, huge things (several %) like gcc
postrgresql and other library / command line stuff, which are never
shown to normal users but have thousands of strings.

So, the Launchpad statistics are simply broken in so many ways you
can't get very meaningful numbers out of there at the moment. Not even
in the way you usually can use statistics to estimate something.

-Timo