Change of Translations Target for Click App Store

[James Tait]

​Hi all,

I’m writing to make you aware of a change in the translations target for
the Click App Store (the one used by the phone and snappy).
tl;dr

Translations for the Highlights and Departments in the store now need to be
managed via the devportal template
<https://translations.launchpad.net/software-center-agent/trunk/+pots/devportal>
.
Background

When the store was first created, everything was English. We knew we would
need translations, but getting the store actually working was the priority,
and although we knew how we wanted to deliver translations, we weren’t
quite sure how we were going to import them. The store currently supports
71 languages, 27 Departments and 11 Highlights. These are dynamic content,
managed via an Admin interface that only a limited number of people can
access. Scaling the task of translating all that was going to be a
challenge!

After discussing this with a few people, leveraging the Ubuntu Translator
community seemed to be the sanest way to achieve the scale we needed. But
since the content we were translating lived in a database, not in a source
tree, we still had to solve the problem of getting the translations from
Launchpad into the database, and then out to the index to be delivered to
devices.
The First Approach

At first the translation template was manually created from a dump of the
Highlights and Departments in the store, then uploaded to Launchpad for
people to translate. This gave us the translations we needed, but they
still had to be added to the database by hand - a tedious, time-consuming
and error-prone process.
Toward Automation

To tackle this, we created a tool that could take an export of the
Departments and Highlights int he database and generate a .pot file, and on
that could take a .po file and import the translations into the database
directly. To ensure that the correct translations ended up in the
appropriate database models, we had to make the template machine-readable.
This meant that the translations that had previously been added in
Launchpad became “invalid” - Launchpad essentially thought that the
different tagging of the strings to be translated meant that they were in
fact completely different strings. The Ubuntu Translator community came to
the rescue again, and the translations were updated.
The Problem

However, what we’d failed to factor in was that phones and snappy weren’t
the only places these strings needed to be localised. When developers are
uploading their packages to the store, they get a fully-localised UI - and
the departments should be localised there, too. But it turns out that
pulling translations from two different templates for a single Django app
is difficult. And so, the most logical solution is to pull the Departments
and Highlights from the same template.
The Rub

Unfortunately, this means the translations previously uploaded will become
invalid once again. As a result, we need to ask you to please complete the
translations in the devportal template
<https://translations.launchpad.net/software-center-agent/trunk/+pots/devportal>
.

I can only apologise for this - the process has been an iterative one, but
we’re confident that we’ve finally arrived at a workable solution. With
this change, the translations uploaded will now be used for the store’s web
UI at package upload time, as well as the existing clients of the Click
Package Index API.

Many thanks, and sincere apologies,

JT
​
-- 
James Tait, BSc. | https://launchpad.net/~jamestait/
Software Engineer, Canonical Online Services
Ubuntu - Linux for human beings | www.ubuntu.com
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