On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 11:28 +0000, Marcos Marado wrote: > On Thursday 14 February 2008 02:54, Christian Grothoff wrote: > > On Wednesday 13 February 2008, Milan wrote: > > > Several points I wished to ask you about: > > > > > > * Canonical's Launchpad (launchpad.net) has an easy-to-use tool to > > > translate free software. Users can propose and/or validate translations > > > using a nice Web interface, and this is quite easy for them to do even > > > when they don't know how to work with .po files. Do you think we should > > > use it? I can have a look at how this is done and create an account for > > > that, it could bring us a broader language support. > > > > I think that the translation project (which does work with po files) is a > > reasonable place and that we should point people who want to help with > > translations to them. We certainly should avoid submitting to two > > organizations, and PO-support is essential. > > I had the idea that Launchpad did the translations for Ubuntu but that those > translations didn't go upstream... Am I wrong? > Launchpad hosts several software projects and several distributions. Whether or not the translations are sent to whatever place depends on people working on that particular thing. Some upstream developers are active on getting translations from Launchpad, I suppose some translators are also active in sending translations to upstream projects. The line between the translators and up-/downstream developers is of course quite blurry.
The point in using Launchpad for translating your software is exactly that you don't have to know anything about po-files. There is lots of man power behind Launchpad. Wielding that power is what I think Milan is suggesting. Launchpad is a website where you can translate software, while Translation Project is a social groups that does translating. TP website seems to be targeted for unix hackers, where as Launchpad is targeted to lightly tech savvy humanists. If you are a die hard GNUnet groupie who wants to translate GNUnet, you don't need any specific tool or project. You can just get the po-files from and "do it" with a text editor. ;-) So Launchpad is not actually a competitor for TP it is just a tool that TP or anyone else can use to do the actual translating. It is a collaborative on line po-editor software. It is extremely user friendly and visual. When you are translating something it shows you translations that have been used in other projects for the same thing. It also allows you to write in translations that you're unsure about and then let someone else confirm them. This is where the politics come in. As GNUnet is a piece of GNU project that endorses freedom, it is unclear whether or not using Launchpad would be politically correct. Launchpad is not entirely free software. Then again Google is proprietary too, yet lot of people use it extensively while they are developing software. If I understood correctly Christian wanted to point out that we should avoid duplicating efforts. I think the people using TP resources and the people using Launchpad are different people and doing the translations at both locations at once would not eat up resources from GNUnet development. Imagine a translator who has previously worked in Launchpad on translating say, gnome-terminal to Hindi. One day he discovers gnunet-gtk and wants to translate that to Hindi too. He then notices that you cannot translate gnunet-gtk in Launchpad. Now there are four things he can choose from: 1) import gnunet to Launchpad for translation 2) translate something uninteresting that is available in Launchpad 3) Find Translation Project on Google and contact them 4) go watch television and drink beer Now, my personal intuition says that, not having GNUnet available for translation in Launchpad greatly increases beer consumption. And after this I'm starting to think that maybe making GNUnet translatable from Launchpad is not that bad of an idea after all. How ever updating translation templates at Launchpad, getting the translations and merging them to svn requires constant work and it would probably not be a good idea to have the core GNUnet developers working on it. So I don't think we should really worry about the subject until someone just starts to work on the issue. In the meanwhile "Happy hacking!" --Toni _______________________________________________ GNUnet-developers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnunet-developers
