Current state of Rosetta

[Timo Jyrinki]

Hi,

I've a few separate things to discuss:

Firstly, why there are so many packages in Rosetta which seemingly don't 
have any but one or two translations available, even if the whole 
package would be translated upstream? Eg. Gnome-games is 100% translated 
in Finnish, yet in Rosetta it seems like the translation hasn't even 
been started. This may have the effect of people doing the same work 
twice. Could _all_ translations be removed from Rosetta except for those 
which are _correctly_ imported there.

Secondly, about the general functionality of Rosetta. There should be 
version control, so that if some translation is overwritten, the earlier 
version of the string can be found again. Also, there should be much 
more co-operation with existing translation efforts like the Gnome 
translation project in which language teams already have their own 
quality control, dictionaries etc. Currently there are no 
language-specific translation guides, which could result in very poor 
translations in case the random Rosetta user has never heard of the 
terminology dictionaries available (for example, for the Finnish: 
http://www.lokalisointi.org/)

Thirdly, system errors still occur; I just tried to translate gksu.

I don't think Rosetta is ready for translating anything bigger than eg. 
gksu before the above things are fixed. Also, it could be better if 
Rosetta was limited to translating those projects which don't have 
proper upstream translation projects, or those Ubuntu-specific programs, 
in case the upstream translation synchronization and quality control 
issues can't be resolved.

BR,
Timo Jyrinki