Rosetta translation issues with syncing upstream and quality of the translations

[Rostislav Raykov]

Hello there,

I am a part of the official Bulgarian GNOME translation team. I again send a
letter to this list, just because of my concern with what's happening with
the translations in Ubuntu. Personally I love the distribution and use it,
also my parents use it. However there is one thing that still is helluva
messy. The translations are not synced with the upstream repositories. I see
GNOME translation strings being compeletly different with the ones that are
upstream. This is very confusing and nontheless frustrating. GNOME is
translated to 100% in Bulgarian but in Ubuntu (which is the most popular
GNOME distribution) the users see empty spaces, untranslated strings, and
erros. However this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm not questioning or disapproving of the work of the volunteers in the
Bulgarian translation team in Rosetta, but they lack some experience we as a
team have gained through the years. We have build a bug tracking system,
developed specifications and unification rules for the translation of the
GNOME software. The translations in Rosetta don't follow the rules. The
translations in Rosetta are not even tested. We get error reports for the
translations in Ubuntu, but we haven't made those exact translations. As far
as I understand the translations in Rosetta gain precedence over the ones
upstream and also the sync is not done regularly. From this not only are
there incomplete and missing translations, where they are already made, but
the quality of the translations is falling. With every update of my Dapper
box language packs I see emerging errors that are not in the offical repos.
I'm not saying it's all the Rosetta translator's fault. I'm saying that
those translators can fill empty spaces that are missed by the official
team. Even more, I'm saying those translators can join the Bulgarian
translation team, because we're always open to people who are willing to
help. And those people have proved they are willing to help by translating
strings in Rosetta. However to keep the translation quality to the level of
every other GNOME distro, we can have some way of letting those people know
the Bulgarian translation team exists and they could follow the
specifications so we would end up with a coherent working environment. If
anyone willing to help translate GNOME to Bulgarian, the project's site is
http://gnome.cult.bg. <http://gnome.cult.bg>
I hope this issue is solved and I think everybody is willing to help to a
certain possible extent, so that the problem is handled in the most positive
and correct way.
Best of all to every volunteer out there :)

Rostislav
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