How much work is a translation/localization of an entire new language?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi Carsten!

On 2023-05-03 15:55, Carsten Agger wrote:
> How much work would it be to translate the standard edition of Ubuntu
> with all pre-installed programs?
Thanks for an interesting question. It's not easy to answer, though. 
Ask Hjorth Larsen already provided some relevant hints, and I wrote this 
reply from a different angle as a supplement to Ask's reply.

Let me phrase my general view on the topic in a somewhat controversial way:

There should not be such a thing as translating Ubuntu only. Ubuntu 
consists of FOSS from a lot of sources, and the most reasonable approach 
for translators is to translate FOSS into language X, rather than only a 
specific Linux distro.

So, why is that? Doesn't Launchpad have an interface for translating 
Ubuntu specifically?

Yes and no. Some notes:

* The Launchpad translation interface for packages is there mostly to 
support the Ubuntu specific language packs. Translations are stripped 
from the packages in the main pocket and instead provided via separate 
language specific packages.

* Even if you can provide translations via the Launchpad interface for 
all those packages, doing so is not optimal. Instead translation should 
be done upstream as far as possible, i.e. via the translation service 
which respective upstream project makes use of. GNOME has its own 
l10n.gnome.org, some important projects use translationproject.org, 
etc., etc.

* Translations should be made through Launchpad:
   1. when Launchpad is upstream with respect to translations
   2. for Ubuntu specific packages and projects
   3. for packages where the bulk of the translations are fetched from
      upstream, but where Ubuntu specific patches add translatable
      strings.

With that said, and to still give you a hint about the volume for Ubuntu 
specifically, let's look at this page:

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/

(click the "View all languages" link to get an overview)

That page indicates 350,000+ translatable strings. But as Ask Hjorth 
Larsen pointed out, you probably want to prioritize and focus on the 
most visible strings for desktop users. OTOH, there are for instance 
Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice which are installed by default 
while their translations are not present in the Launchpad translation 
interface, but handled elsewhere.

I would say that establishing a new language in the world of FOSS is 
quite a big undertaking, whether the work is done by volunteers or 
professional translators.

-- 
Rgds,

Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj