What happens to translations when upstream is brought in

[Og Maciel]

All,

Good and interesting remarks from both angles have been exposed, but
the one thing I would like to see (and I'm sure everyone as well) is a
combined solution to the issue.  It is MHO that any team,
Gnome/KDE/you-name-it, would be at an advantage point if they were to
take advantage of what Rosetta can offer now and all the potential it
has for the future.  Let me explain this a bit more...

Right now, and I ask for forgiveness if I miss anything OR provide
incomplete information from this point onward, there is a pretty steep
learning curve for new collaborators to join any of the major
localization teams out there.  The reason I say this is due to the
number of steps and applications required to perform translations the
way most teams are set up.  You have to learn about PO files, how to
handle them, how the file headers should be treated, how something
should be marked as fuzzy, maybe even create a diff (maybe?), etc...

I think that Rosetta has bridged the enrmous gap that existed between
the open source communities (localizartion teams in especific) and the
general community of users.  This means that even if someone doesn't
take the time to read any docuemntation put out there by the
individual teams (Rosetta) and jumps right in, all they are really
doing is sending more suggestions... There is no major learning curve
involved, and though you will get some screwy suggestions, you cannot
deny the overall positive effect that it has not only for the team
members, who now have more data to sample and maybe come up with the
best translations (based on their set of quality standards), but also
for the overall community who can now relate to the whole open source
experience!

I firmly believe that both Gnome/KDE/[insert your favorite
localization team here] can take advantage of this process!  If the
existing localization teams were to bring in to the table their
know-how and were willing to join forces, I'm sure we can all benefit
from it!  I'm not claiming that this has not been done in the past,
for I'm one of the "new kids on the block", but I find that Rosetta
has a lot of potential and would be a whole lot easier/faster to
gather data via its web interface than having a very select group of
individuals doing it all via POs and what not.

So I propose a new direction for this thread.  Instead of trying to
dig out more issues and problems with the current situation, how about
we set out to come up with a set of ways we could make it work for
everyone?

Ideas?

Cheers,
-- 
Og B. Maciel

(Leader) Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translators

ogmaciel at ubuntu.com
ogmaciel at ubuntubrasil.org
og.maciel at gmail.com

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