Launchpad messing with the translaions?

[David Planella]

Hi Khaled,

El dj 18 de 03 de 2010 a les 00:05 +0200, en/na Khaled Hosny va
escriure:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 01:08:37PM +0100, David Planella wrote:
> > Hi Khaled
> > 
> > El dt 16 de 03 de 2010 a les 13:21 +0200, en/na Khaled Hosny va
> > escriure:
> > > While working on Lucid translation, I'm seeing many weird things (that
> > > is, above the usual launchpad weirdness level).
> > > 
> > > * indicator-session containing translations we didn't approve, I've bee
> > >   told that those came from the 'upstream' launchpad project, and that I
> > >   should translate it there. But, the "upstream" has no translations
> > >   available!
> > >   https://translations.launchpad.net/indicator-session
> > 
> > I cannot actually remember it right now, but it could have been that the
> > upstream project was open for translations for a while, and that the
> > permissions were set to Open. That might have been the problem.
> > 
> > We try hard to let developers know about translation permissions [1],
> > and recommend using Restricted or Structured permissions, but sometimes
> > projects are still set up for Open translations. Whenever I see that, I
> > recommend developers to change it, and I encourage translators to do it
> > as well.
> 
> The problem is that one can never know about such things and we are very
> likely to ship with broken translation, I don't go and re-review the
> already reviewed translation for each Ubuntu release. Right now, I don't
> know how many translations have been broken this way, and a full review
> is not an option.
> 

This issue only affected indicator-session, as far as I know. I've
talked with Sebastien, Ted Gould and Kyle, and here's what happened:

As you know, Ubuntu is also used in commercial projects, which use the
same (or modified) packages as the free Ubuntu distribution. These
commercial projects have got generally different schedules than Ubuntu,
and sometimes translations must be completed by a certain date, a
schedule that cannot be forced upon voluntary translators. In those
cases, translations are completed privately and then released in an
Ubuntu package and given to Ubuntu Translators for them to modify and
correct if necessary.

That's what we did for example with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR)
translations a few months back, as was explained on the list back then.

Also as learned back then, Ubuntu translations constitute sometimes
important fixes, so these are preferred over the private translations.
Once translations of a given package have been opened to the community,
the idea is to export the Ubuntu translations and merge them back into
the upstream project in Launchpad (which we recommend in these cases not
to expose translations, in order to avoid two sources of translation),
giving priority to the Ubuntu strings.

That is the background. The particular problem with indicator-session
was that the upstream package contained some private or old translations
in its trunk, while translation activity in the Ubuntu source package
was happening at the same time. Due to a mistake, the step of exporting
Ubuntu translations and committing them to the package's trunk was
missed. When uploading a new version of the package, as Launchpad now
prefers upstream translation over Ubuntu ones [1], unless explicitly
changed, the imported translations overwrote the ones from the Ubuntu
package.

While we'll make sure that this does not happen again, I'd like to ask
translators to review the indicator-session strings [2] to make sure
they're ok in their language.

> > I'm not sure who recommended you to translate upstream, but I can
> > confirm what you already saw: indicator-session is only currently
> > translatable by Ubuntu Translators, and the upstream project is
> > currently not open for translation.
> 
> Sebastien Bacher, to him the aforementioned translations were
> attributed, suggested that when I approached him about the issue.
> 
> > > * too many of the fixed translations in update-manager, that we fixed in
> > >   earlier releases, were reverted to the old, buggy (i.e. causing
> > >   software crashes!) translations, the corrections are available as
> > >   suggestion though!
> > > 
> > 
> > I'm not sure what happened there. I know that Michael (mvo), the update
> > manager developer, exports translations from Launchpad from time to
> > time, but the upstream update-manager has no translation template
> > exposed.
> > 
> > You might already have corrected the invalid translations, but could you
> > point us to them (or just paste here the correct and incorrect ones), so
> > that it is possible to track this and we can submit a bug if necessary?
> 
> Here are some examples:
> https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/update-manager/+pots/update-manager/ar/242/+translate
> https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/update-manager/+pots/update-manager/ar/243/+translate
> 
> The 'packaged' are the wrong ones (will crash the application) and were
> originally fixed several months ago.
> 

Right, thanks for the new details. I still haven't found out what
happened with them, but I'll investigate further.

I've got a related question:

These are python-format strings using unnamed arguments (%s). If I
remember correctly, this forces on languages such as Arabic the use of
not so grammatically correct translations for the first plural forms
(you need to specify the %s arguments in all cases). Using named
arguments (%s(days)) would allow you dropping the arguments and provide
more correct translations. I could propose changing that string to use
named arguments.

Would that change be useful to you and other languages facing the same
problem and do you think it would justify a string freeze exception?

Regards,
David.

[1]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/KnowledgeBase/TranslationsPrecedence
[2]
https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/indicator-session

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
david(dot)planella(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com



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