Clean Sheet?

[Peter Damoc]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:29:57 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth <mark at canonical.com> wrote:

> Jonathon Blake wrote:
>
>> Peter wrote:
>>> is Rosetta gonna duplicate that?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Yes.
>>
> Not if we can help it :-)
>
> Our game plan is to merge upstream translations regularly, as well as
> translations from any other sources we can find in a consistent
> programmatic fashion. It will take some time to get all of those pieces
> in place but I'm confident that we can get things setup so that
> translation collaboration is a reality.
>

Forgive me for saying this but the situation is rather silly... there are several web based translation systems and old translations...
what should a wannabe translator do? join a project and translate it's pot, join web-based community X or join web-based community Y? it will be a royal mess!

In my view Rosetta should be a translation service for the open source community, it should be powered by open source software and the affiliation with Ubuntu/Canonical should be emphasised as incidental.
Translations via Rosetta should be encouraged by software maintainers.... if you can accomplish that most of the duplicated effort will disappear.... however if let's say GNOME's maintainers say something like "we don't want Rosetta" then you have a problem because there is a BIG chance that GNOME's translators will never touch Rosetta and it will be rather hard to find translators willing to take on such a beast. However if GNOME's maintainers say something like "all translations must be ported to Rosetta by next release" you've got the exact opposite situation... because you'll have other maintainers thinking "If GNOME does it maybe we should do it too".

Anyway... this is my view... my 2c if you may :)

-- 
Peter Damoc
jack of all trades, master of none
http://www.sigmacore.net/