Thanks to you all, 9.04 will be a great release in all languages

[Timo Jyrinki]

Hi,

This is just a small ”thank you” and also ”just look at that” kind of
post. The thing that should be looked at is:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TranslatingUbuntu/JauntyTranslationIssues

Virtually all I18N issues that were a) never fixed in eg. intrepid (or
earlier) b) found out as new (having existed also before) have been
fixed during jaunty. Developers have been extremely helpful in making
the ”Every computer user should be able to use their software in the
language of their choice” a reality. Also the general knowledge of
I18N issues and how to do it right has increased.

In addition to those mentioned on the page, there have been
improvements elsewhere as well. Debian package description
translations have now a working two-direction solution for merging
(proposing) translations between Debian and Ubuntu, and for the first
time anyway all the DDTP scripts are top-notch so that all description
translations from both Debian and Ubuntu are shown as they should be.
The short package descriptions shown in eg. gnome-app-install are also
fully translatable now for the first time, though also intrepid had
the possibility for majority of the data there (before that, nothing
was possible to translate regarding the short descriptions). These
affect a lot anyone considering installing a package, which now do not
necessarily see foreign language at all (of course it's useful if the
actual program is also localized after the installation ;)).

There are still places where more or better I18N would be needed. I
would guess some notifications might still be lacking I18N, or
translations are hard-coded. There are maybe a bit too many (not so
easy to solve) "hacks" where proper translations need manual
maintainer intervention. KDE (or Kubuntu, or Ubuntu build system) has
some obvious I18N problems in places. Hard drive check (and other boot
stuff, except live-cd boot menu) messages are untranslated. The
Live-CD simply cannot, ever, include all translations so for most
languages the live session is purely English except for the installer.
Rosetta, upstreams, Ubuntu-specific changes... well, has been
discussed forever and will need even more of that. Etc.

But still, the progress jaunty has made is truly awesome, since
basically everything that has perhaps bothered the casual Ubuntu
default installation user has been fixed. It's only that when you
approach perfectness, even the little flaws, in corners, show up
better. All in all Ubuntu 9.04 will be I think the most translated and
translatable free software desktop distribution there is.

-Timo