Handling of upstream translations in Rosetta

[Claude Paroz]

Le mercredi 30 août 2006 à 16:26 +0200, Jannick Kuhr a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> if I understood everything right the procedure at the moment is the following. 
> Please correct me if I am wrong.
> 
> Situation 1:
[...]
> 
> Situations 3, 4 and 5 are quite different in my eyes. If the translation in 
> Rosetta takes priority over the upstream translation the result would be a 
> fork, because Ubuntu don't recieve changes from upstream automatically and 
> has its "own translation", different from all other distributions. At least 
> if no one changes the translations to the suggested upstream translations 
> manually. But this will probably never happen in the majority of teams, just 
> because of the lack of manpower. Especially in situation 4 this is 
> problematic, because the translation is not really Ubuntu's own translation 
> but an outdated upstream translation.

Thanks Jannick for your very accurate analysis of Ubuntu-upstream
relationship.

My situation is very close. I would like to resynchronize upstream Gnome
translations with Ubuntu, and this is problematic. 

Let's take the example of gnome-desktop-2.0 package in French. If you
look at https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+lang/fr, you see that
38% of 73 strings have been changed in Rosetta:

a) some strings may have been added while they weren't translated
upstream (situation 3-5).

b) some strings have been corrected in Rosetta because upstream may have
errors.

c) some strings may have been explicitly changed because of an Ubuntu
specific policy.

The most correct way to resynchronize would be to compare each string,
which is not feasible, IMHO.

So what?
The only practical way would be to clear all strings in Rosetta, and
then reimport the upstream po file. But with the risk of loosing the
strings in category b) and c).

I would be interested to know the idea of Rosetta devs about this
matter.

> I think to achieve this goal it is better to change the 
> behaviour of Rosetta in situations 3, 4 and 5 in the following way: Import the 
> upstream translation automatically and add the Rosetta one as a suggestion.

However, we should be able to divert from upstream for specific cases
(see b) and c)). Maybe an option like "this string is explicitly
different from upstream" with a comment.

Regards.

Claude