Sending translation back

[Christian Rose]

lör 2005-06-11 klockan 07:08 +0100 skrev Mark Shuttleworth:
> Matjaz Horvat wrote:
> 
> >I'd like to translate Gnome to Slovenian (actually almost 50% is done).
> >
> >I wonder if you send the translations from Rosetta back to Gnome
> >developers (and same for other packages)?
>
> We do make it quite easy for them to collect the translations, and more
> and more upstreams are starting to do that. It's not possible for us to
> commit them directly to upstream revision control from Rosetta.

Really, that's the oposite way around. We don't have any resources to
track and collect translations from all places downstream (Rosetta, Sun,
Novell, Fedora, Debian, and who knows what downstream projects there are
at any given moment).

The responsibility lies on the downstream project to make patches and
improvements it want to be used to be contributed back upstream. You
don't see many software projects working any other way, either. I
haven't heard of any many software projects where the attitude was "oh,
we'll just put our downstream patches on our web server somewhere and
hope that upstream magically finds them, picks them up, and then
integrates them". It doesn't work that way, and the reasons for that
should be obvious.

The only reasonable solution is to encourage contributors to work
upstream if possible, and if that's not possible, automate the process
of sending contributions to the upstream translation team for review.
Putting all the burden of contributing back upstream on the individual
contributors is a recipe for failure -- most translators will not
realize there is a problem ("all I need to do is translate and put it
into this system, right?"), and for those who do, manually sending
translations upstream is often tedious work.


Christian