Current state of Rosetta

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi Timo

> 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 

When we first opened up Rosetta, we thought it would be a good idea to 
let anybody upload .pot and .po files they wanted to translate. As it 
happens, lots people have uploaded files, as intended, but what we 
missed is that people would only upload the pofiles for the language 
*they* are interested in.

So, for example, someone translating upstream product foo into Hungarian 
uploads the .pot and the Hungarian .po, and finishes their translation 
in Rosetta.

Then, of course, other people come along and think that the other 
languages are not at all translated, when in fact upstream translations 
do exist.

For this reason we are changing the process to require that people 
upload the complete set of translations, or that people point us at the 
translations so that we can do it ourselves.

> 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. 

We will support this in future, along with better control over who can 
overwrite a string and who cannot.

> 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/)

We hope that this coordination will be finished over the coming months.

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

If the bug is reproducible, please file a bug!

  https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/products/rosetta/+bugs

> 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. 

We can't prevent people from using Rosetta. Also, we will shortly be 
using Rosetta for translations across the whole of Ubuntu, so almost 
every application will be there and translatable, and those translations 
will be used in Ubuntu. We are already working with the larger upstream 
translation projects to build efficient channels for sharing 
translations, those are weak right now but I expect them to be strong 
within a few months.

Thanks for your excellent commentary.

Mark