Hi Osma,

> I recently installed DoudouLinux Hyperborea for my two children (aged
> 5
> and 7). Both got their own (old) laptops. It's great and they've been
> enjoying it a lot - but I noticed that the Finnish translations are
> not
> very up to date :(

Pleased to read these words :).

Translations progress depends a lot on translators availability for a given 
language. Languages that are very well translated rely on translators that 
follow the project on a long term basis. But for most languages, translators 
are available during a shorter period and translation progress stops as soon as 
they get busy with other activities.

> So I joined the Finnish translator team on Transifex today and
> contributed some Finnish translations for many of the
> DoudouLinux-specific packages. I hope the updates will eventually
> find
> their way to official packages and releases - and to my kids'
> computers :)

Minor releases are the official way to get translations back to DoudouLinux 
(DDL in short) after a major version is published. As the latest release 2.1 
was out in early December, next update will probably not get published before 
March (version 2.2). Also we are currently working on version 2.5, a migration 
of DDL from Debian Squeeze to Debian Wheezy. The purpose of 2.5 is to prepare 
3.0, which will bring updated translations from Transifex (for Debian Wheezy) – 
and probably larger changes in the software selection. Version 2.5 will be kind 
of “vanilla” release concerning translations.

> I'm wondering if the translations of these packages are
> somehow
> synced with Debian and/or the upstream projects?

Unfortunately no. Some of our translators may punctually push their work 
upstream but we have nobody to push all our translation work upstream. If you 
are interested in doing this job, you're welcome! This would avoid us in the 
future the huge work of porting our existing translations to newer versions of 
applications when we are changing of Debian version.

> For example, many KDE games and applications are missing lots of
> translations in DoudouLinux. But I know DoudouLinux is still mostly
> based on Debian Squeeze and there may be better translations
> available
> in newer Debian releases (or sid) and upstream KDE.

Similarly, merging the latest upstream translations to our ones on Transifex 
would currently require too much work for our team. Of course we should do this 
to avoid translators redo a job that has already been done upstream. I made 
trials a long time ago to automate this work partly. Basically I was trying to 
identify the URL of some upstream translation sources in order to merge them 
into our translations using i18n tools. Again you can take over from me if you 
feel interested in this topic.

> Similarly, if I do add new translations for e.g. KDE apps using the
> DoudouLinux Transifex project, do these ever find their way to
> upstream
> Debian and/or KDE?

As you've understood, most probably no. Maybe I'm wrong however, I can't be 
sure. For example I noticed, working on the migration to Wheezy, that the LXDE 
team took some of our patches back into their official source code. Debian 
derivatives guys have developed a smart system that regularly fetches source 
packages from distribution derivatives and then publish the diff of packages 
officially in Debian. If Debian developers take time to look at these diff's 
while they also contribute to the upstream project, they can then decide to 
adopt changes made by derivatives.

That said, translations in Debian are managed by independent translation teams. 
A long time ago I contacted the man managing the French team and he explained 
me we should contact each package manager and each upstream project to 
contribute back with our translations. If you are interested in making this 
topic progress, you should probably start by polling again some Debian 
translation teams as well as some upstream projects.

Cheers,
JM.

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