Translations from the debian-installer package

[Milo Casagrande]

--- Ven 31/10/08, Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv at canonical.com> ha scritto:
> That would be great!  This is exactly the sort of
> initiative a 
> coordinator would be taking.  Some of the exceptional
> packages also 
> require special treatment in the Launchpad code, and I
> would love to 
> match those up with community documentation.

Sorry for catching up only today with this discussion, been very busy with the release for the Italian team.

I've been trying to write a document about the d-i translation process, I had an email exchange with Ben Collins and also with Christian Perrier some time ago about this issue (and other i18n related things)... but due to lack of time and real life work, I've not been able to complete that document.

You can find it here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MiloCasagrande/DebianInstaller

it's basically a draft, but I've been writing down some ideas on my computer during this period of time on what to write and what needs to be written.

I'm more than happy if somebody will help me out and more than happy to share the ideas I collected.

> This, too, is one of those things I've been hoping to
> see.  Not 
> necessarily "just" template changes, but
> coordination across translation 
> teams in general.  My impression so far has been that
> automated RSS 
> feeds can do part of the work, but not all.

On a side note, but always related to i18n/l10n and to help translators and who work within Ubuntu, I was thinking about proposing, during the coming UDS, an "i18n blocker specification" for the packages in "main". What does this mean: if Ubuntu ships a new program that has no upstream relation, this package *has to be* fully internationalized and must be translatable (not translated, but at least translatable). Why this? I'm thinking about the "Ubuntu Promise" (quoting "Ubuntu includes the very best translations...") and what happened during this release with two new programs in main that weren't translatable until the very last moment (at least one of them...).

For achieving this, I think we also need a really good doc about i18n best practices: how developers are supposed to handle i18n stuff and how to internationalize their programs (which libraries to use and how...). GNOME documentation on this front looks a little bit out of date... and I think Ubuntu has no docs about this. I think it could be a good upstream collaboration/effort project too...

There are other things that should, and probably have to, be documented like David said... how the lang-packs are handled and many more...

--
Milo Casagrande <milo_casagrande at yahoo.it>


      Unisciti alla community di Io fotografo e video, il nuovo corso di fotografia di Gazzetta dello sport:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/iofotografoevideo