I'm crossposting this to -boot as I'm considering using the above for D-I material, but indeed this is not restricted to D-I stuff.
The Ubuntu project recently announced the Rosetta project while the Translate Toolkit team announced the Pootle project at about the same moment. Rosetta: https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta Pootle�: http://pootle.wordforge.org Both projects have similar goals�: offer a web interface to FOSS project localisation efforts. The principles are quite similar�: developers or development teams "register" projects, upload the templates files to these projects and then wait for some translators to jump into the project and start producing translation files, as PO files. The advantage for translators is obvious�: the interface is very simple and involved people can focus on the real work�: deal with PO files, and just forget about "nasty" stuff such as dealing with various Revision Control Systems or reporting bugs in various bug tracking systems. As far as I understand, developers are then responsible for "grabbing" the translated file, check them and integrate them in their developments. As one of the people in charge of Debian Installer i18n/l10n effort coordination, I see an immediate benefit to this�: we would no more need to drive translators to our sometimes complex system for maintaining translations (especially when we come at levels 2, 3 and 4). We just have to keep the POT files up-to-date and either grab translations from time to time...or have the package maintainers do it. To my experience, this would certainly help some teams or individuals, especially those who work with loosy or highly firewalled Internet access (the example of the current handling of Bosnian translations comes to my mind). I would really start an experience with some parts of D-I or related packages with one of these systems, just to see which benefit we could get from it. The idea is NOT REPLACING the current work method, which is OK for several teams and translators. It is just about adding an alternate method for working for people who cannot easily work with the existing ones. However, we need to decide which one to use. At first glance, I would tend to favour the Rosetta system. This is mainly because we (Debian, and especially the D-I team) have close interaction with several Ubuntu contibutors and also because, up to now, I have seen several benefits from Ubuntu go back into Debian. On the other hand, other people may have concerns about using an infrastructure controlled by a commercial company such as Canonical. The infrastructure itself is, as far as I know, not based on free software products (I may be wrong...this is not very clear to me). This is not my own concern, but I feel it may be shared so I would not drive us into something which could make some people uncomfortable. Another argument is that the Pootle project seems to have been adopted (or on its way to be adopted) by several "key" FOSS projects and has already received a great interest in the i18n/l10n community. I certainly would prefer seeing both projects converge but I may be dreaming.. I just need your opinion about such ideas....as usually in Debian, the final decision will need to be made on a consensus basis (or what will be closer to a consensus..:-))). Maybe the Ubuntu-involved people could tell us more about Rosetta...and correct mistaken ideas I, or others, could have. We may also just decide to ignore these tools...or build our own (aka reinvent the wheel)....let's just discuss this. --
