[Ambassadors] Lost in translation (Ubuntu and Launchpad translations)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 21.05.2008, 09:17 +0200 schrieb Valent Turkovic:
> Hi,
> I have came a cross an issue that I didn't see discussed in this
> mailing list, but if there was such a discussion before please point
> me to it.
> 
> First I have noticed that in previous and latest Ubuntu release that
> Gnome translation is much better that I see in Fedora 8 and 9.

I assume you mean the translations are much worse than in Fedora.
Ubuntu's are inconsistent and do not honor upstream's work, and this was
lamented several times, for example in
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/125/ . In fact they even break the
Gnome Translation rules, at least this is known for the German
translations. See http://live.gnome.org/de/UebersetzungsRichtlinien (if
you speak german ;)) and compare this to what Ubuntu made.

As you might know Hendrik Richter, the coordinator of the German Gnome
Translation left Ubuntu and joined Fedora Trans Team recently, see
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-de/2008-April/msg00003.html
(unfortunately it's in German too)

> I
> wondered why and contacted croatian gnome translation team. The reason
> is that they use Ubuntu Launchpad to do the translations and so all
> translation are not automatically pushed to upstream gnome.
> 
> I feel that this is broken by design. There are options to export
> translations from Lauchpad and we are working on getting them to
> upstream Gnome right now. I can only guess but I suspect that our
> translation team is not the only one caught in this "lost in
> translation" Lauchpad trap. There are probably lots of translation
> teams around the world using launchpad to do their translations.

Nope. AFAIK Ubuntu are the only one.

> So my questions is - has there been any talk with Ubuntu developers
> and translators regarding this? Do you think this is an issue? Why?

No, at least it is not our issue. If Ubuntu wants use translations that
are different from the rest of distros that are so bad that they don't
make it upstream, it's definitely not Fedora's issue. ;)

> How is translation in Fedora handling translation and upstream?

Fedora uses transifex. Most of the time we use upstream's translations
but for apps that are developed on/for Fedora we are upstream.

For more information you should probably ask fedora-trans-list I think.
> 
> Thank you for your time,
> Valent, croatian Fedora Ambassador.

Christoph Wickert