Lost translations from ubuntu-docs

[David Planella]

Hi Matthew,

2008/10/15 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
>
> The strings are not identical: they are just similar. Rosetta has no
> way of remembering translations of similar English strings (for
> obvious reasons).
>

I have not checked whether all the strings were 100% identical, but in
any case until very recently, Rosetta *did* remember in a way similar
strings changed in the templates. They used to appear as suggestions,
which were nothing else than fuzzy strings.

I am suspecting this has to do with the recently approved Rosetta
blueprint related to not showing fuzzy strings on the Launchpad UI,
but I would have thought that at least the strings would appear in the
downloaded PO file. But unfortunately, that's not the case, either.

Simply discarding fuzzy translations can lead to lots of wasted work.
Just considering a quite usual case: a package 100% translated, with
strings where the developer has forgotten to add the period at the end
of the sentence. If he later releases a new template where he simply
adds this period on the strings where it was missing, after a usual
"refresh" with gettext tools (e.g. intltool) all those strings will
appear as fuzzy in the PO file, which the translator can then
translate quite quickly and without need of duplicate work.

Now if all those fuzzy strings had just been supressed (imagine just a
few documentation strings, which are usually quite long), all the
previous work cannot be used as a reference and will simply have been
wasted.

Note that at the moment I am only guessing that the problem lies in
the removal of fuzzy strings. Something more knowledgeable on Rosetta
might have something else to say here.

Regards,
David.