Firefox translations status in Natty

Wed Feb 9 18:51:35 UTC 2011

Hi David

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 7:16 PM, David Planella
<david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> El ds 05 de 02 de 2011 a les 19:05 +0100, en/na Ask Hjorth Larsen va
> escriure:
>> Hi David
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi David
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:00 PM, David Planella
>> > <david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> >> Hi translators,
>> >>
>> >> I thought I'd give you a quick update on the Firefox translations in
>> >> Natty:
>> >>
>> >> Due to a change in the way upstream packages translations, those of you
>> >> who are testing Natty will have noticed that Firefox is in English only.
>> >>
>> >> During the Canonical Platform Rally last week we worked on fixing this
>> >> to import translations into Launchpad and put them in the language
>> >> packs. Special thanks go to Danilo on his great work on modifying po2xpi
>> >> for the new format [1], Chris Coulson for getting the Firefox en-US
>> >> template to build automatically and Martin Pitt to integrate the po2xpi
>> >> changes into langpack-o-matic [2], which will allow to build the Firefox
>> >> translations and put them into the language packs.
>> >>
>> >> If all goes well, most of the translations should be available after
>> >> Alpha-2 on February the 3rd.
>> >>
>> >>      * Once they are available, please make sure to test them well and
>> >>        report any bugs you might find.
>> >>
>> >> In addition to that, while importing some upstream translations we
>> >> noticed a couple of bugs. These need to be fixed upstream, so I'd like
>> >> to ask the teams affected to coordinate with upstream to fix them.
>> >>
>> >> Here are the bugs in Launchpad with upstream links:
>> >>
>> >> Brazilian Portuguese:
>> >> https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/704210
>> >>
>> >> Norwegian Nynorsk:
>> >> https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/704202
>> >>
>> >> Oriya:
>> >> https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/704205
>> >>
>> >> Telugu:
>> >> https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/704208
>> >>
>> >> Tamil:
>> >> https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/704211
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>      * Please work with the upstream teams to get these fixed. In the
>> >>        meantime, you can fix them in the xpi files for Ubuntu [3] and
>> >>        upload them.
>> >>
>> >> Finally, just a note to say that we imported the translations from [4].
>> >> I know some teams haven't got their translations in there yet, only on
>> >> Mercurial. We've only imported the official ones for now. If you need
>> >> your non-official translation to get imported, let us know and we'll see
>> >> if we can figure something out.
>> >>
>> >> Regards,
>> >> David.
>> >>
>> >> [1] https://code.launchpad.net/~mozillateam/po2xpi/trunk
>> >> [2] https://launchpad.net/langpack-o-matic
>> >> [3] https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+source/firefox/+imports?field.filter_status=FAILED&field.filter_extension=all
>> >> [4] http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/linux-i686/
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> David Planella
>> >> Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
>> >> www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
>> >> www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
>> >
>> > Are there any ubuntu-specific changes to the firefox templates?  I
>> > notice that we have a few untranslated strings, and this is unusual
>> > because the Danish upstream Mozilla translators tend to keep it at
>> > 100%.
>> >
>> > Regards
>> > Ask
>> >
>>
>> How are the untranslated strings in Firefox supposed to be translated?
>>  They are all on the form "update.downloading.end",
>> "setup.tosAgree2.accesskey" and so on.  That usually means they should
>> not be translated.  But then why are they marked for translation?
>> Anders Jenbo told me that apparently they are placeholders for other
>> strings that one would need the source code to figure out.
>>
>> The following languages have translated Firefox 100%:  Slovenian,
>> Spanish, Albanian, British, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese.   These
>> have all dealt with these strings by copying the English ones.  Can
>> someone please tell us all what the right thing to do is?
>>
>> Regards
>> Ask
>
> Hi Ask,
>
> Let me first add a bit of background: Launchpad is based on the gettext
> model, in which you've got a .pot template with a fixed set of messages
> and then translations in each language.
>
> The way Launchpad supports the Mozilla XPI format is accomodating it as
> much as it can be to gettext. Mozilla does not have the concept of
> templates, there are only .xpi files for each available language.
> However, what can be done is to consider the en-US.xpi file as the
> master template, from which other languages create the translations.
>
> So far so good, except for the fact that the translations in Mozilla do
> not necessarily have to match the en-US.xpi file, so, for example in the
> fi.xpi you could just omit some messages that are in en-US.xpi file.
>
> Folowing this example, and considering that Mozilla translations are
> nothing else as .properties and .dtd files zipped inside an .xpi
> archive, let's imagine the en-US.xpi template contains a file called
> dummy.properties, which looks like this:
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> # Write your first translation in the "New translation" text box.
> firstTranslation=My first ever translation
>
> # Wow, you're getting good, now write your second translation.
> secondTranslation=My second translation
>
> # Optional, finish it off with a third one.
> thirdTranslation=My third translation
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> ca.xpi  (the Catalan translation of Firefox) also contains a file called
> dummy.properties, and it looks like this:
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> # Write your first translation in the "New translation" text box.
> firstTranslation=La meva primera traducció
>
> # Wow, you're getting good, now write your second translation.
> firstTranslation=La segona traducció
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> Notice above that the Catalan dummy.properties file is missing the third
> translation altogether, which is a valid situation in the Mozilla
> format. In gettext, the number of translatable strings should be the
> same in the template and in the translation file
>
> So in Launchpad the "My first ever translation", "My second translation"
> and "My third translation" strings would be the equivalent to msgid's,
> and "La meva primera traducció" and so on would be the equivalents to
> msgstr's. As Launchpad is modelled on gettext, and it expect the same
> number of msgid's in the template and in the translation, it creates an
> empty (untranslated) msgid for "My third translation", which is what you
> then can see as untranslated if you go to the Catalan translation page
> of Firefox. So in LP you'd see:
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> English: My first ever translation
> {i} Write your first translation in the "New translation" text box.
> Current Catalan: La meva primera traducció
>
> English: My second translation
> {i} Wow, you're getting good, now write your second translation.
> Current Catalan: La segona traducció
>
> English: My third translation
> {i} Optional, finish it off with a third one.
> Current Catalan: (empty)
>
> 8<---------------------------------------------
>
> I think in this case, the best thing to do is to just leave them
> untranslated, as they were omitted upstream, so it can be safely assumed
> that they were not needed.
>
> Regards,
> David.
>
> --
> David Planella
> Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
> www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
> www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
>

Thank you for the thorough explanation.  So to sum up, we can
translate these particular strings to anything, and no one will need
to care.  Excellent.

Regards
Ask