Establishing and maintaining a relationship with upstream and some other questions

[Moritz Baumann]

Hello Andrej.

Am Freitag, dem 21.05.2010, um 15:51 schrieb Andrej Znidarsic:
> I am a coordinatior of slovenian ubuntu translation group and I was
> wondering what are your experiences with establishing and maintaining a
> good relationship with upstream.

The most important thing is contacting your local KDE/GNOME translation team 
and developing guidelines together with them. I’d also recommend you to ask at 
least one of the members of your team to subscribe to their mailing lists.

We (the German translation teams) have agreed upon the following procedure, 
which you may suggest to your upstream teams as well:

 * GNOME
  - Bug reports are forwarded to GNOME Bugzilla
  - Before the translation of a GNOME program is changed in Launchpad, the po
    file has to be reserved at l10n.gnome.org (notifying anyone is not
    necessary)
  - Changed po files are uploaded to l10n.gnome.org
 * KDE
  - All bugs and changes are announced on their mailing list
  - Changes are being sent as patches to the po file. The current upstream po
    file can be downloaded via the web interface at l10n.kde.org
 * Translation Project: German translation team seems to be completely dead,
   so there’s noone we could co-operate with

Since the German KDE and GNOME translation teams provide complete translations 
for almost all relevant programs, we’re in a very comfortable situation. If 
that’s not the case for Slovenian, you might have to require every Ubuntu 
translator to be an active contributor in one of the upstream teams as well or 
agree upon closer co-operation. (We currently recommend everyone to become a 
member of the upstream translation teams, although it’s not necessary.)

> In what way do you divide work as it can be somehow tricky to determine
> what is upstream for some not obvious packages ?

In case of doubt I always try to find the po file on l10n.gnome.org or 
l10n.kde.org.

Feel free to copy our current lists of ubuntu specific packages/projects:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGermanTranslators/Aufgaben/Lucid/Ubuntu
(Graphical applications for Ubuntu; Second headline reads »Ubuntu-specific 
modifications«)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGermanTranslators/Aufgaben/Lucid/Kubuntu
(Same as above for Kubuntu, the last section lists upstream translations we 
had to import manually/change and can be ignored)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGermanTranslators/Aufgaben/Lucid/Installation
(All other relevant packages except the documentation and the ubuntu manual, 
divided into »live cd«, »package descriptions« and »system tools«. Last 
section should be ignored)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGermanTranslators/Aufgaben/Lucid/Sonstiges
(Projects which you might want to help translate; as always please ignore the 
last section which lists upstream projects we worked on)

> In what way you handle bug reporting ? Do you fix it in launchpad or
> forward it to upstream and wait for them to fix it or both ?

Both. Forward it to upstream (either their bug tracker or notify their mailing 
list, according to their preferences) and then fix the bug in Launchpad so that 
you don’t have to wait. At least that’s okay for our upstream teams, please 
ask yours before you do so for not being evil. ;-)

> Also i was wondering if anyone knows if there are any plans to enable
> control of proofreading. Even though the people in translation group are
> generally experienced translators they are still humans, and sometimes make
> mistakes.
> To ensure best possible quality of translations we were considering that
> one person proofreads other's person translation.

IMO this is quite important and therefore we have a similar guideline, 
although we didn’t have enough time to comply with it in the last months …

> Additionally we are trying to divide work (who does what) within the
> translation group. (some people prefer to work "offline" with a program
> like poedit). It's annoying that each person needs to go to wiki and write
> they want to translate some program, and then people need to check the
> wiki to be sure they are not duplicating some other's people work. Also
> sometimes people start working but forget to write it in (or remove it
> from) the wiki, which can lead to confusion and duplication of effort.
> It would be great if the information about "reservation" of translation
> would be available in launchpad directly next to the package name.
> Similarly a name of the proofreader could be specified.

This is definitely needed! +1 from the whole German team! Does anyone know 
whether something similar is planned? (I know, I already asked that some weeks 
ago, but noone replied.)

> How are other teams coping with these issues and are you aware of any
> similar solution which would make organization of work easier ?

In case we’d have to wait for ages until Rosetta gets this feature, some 
members of the German translation team have agreed to write a PHP application 
with LP OpenID support. I recently found out that Launchpad doesn’t expose any 
information relevant for translators via its API, so it could take quite some 
time to produce something useful. Therefore we won’t start trying to develop 
anything until someone tells me that we won’t get this incredibly simple 
feature anytime soon (which hopefully won’t happen).

Hope I could help!

Moritz