Konnichiwa, Within the last couple of days we, at Kubuntu, have been working out a list of major issues we are facing with the current translation process. They are of considerable impact since I know quite some people who actually decided to not translate Kubuntu any longer, or even stopped using it. But not only users are affected, I think if we continue to ship Kubuntu with such poor quality we will also see a decrease in contributors as well. Why would somone who lives in France, spend his spare time on Kubuntu when he can't even make his mom or brother use it because they wouldn't understand half the system.
First off I'd like to direct your attention to http://www.flickr.com/photos/19616...@n00/sets/72157608562200171/ Which provides a set of pictures documenting the state of translation in Kubuntu and openSUSE, starting with 8.04. It especially gives a quite good impression of what is going on in-development and how the end result relates to that. Now, I know that especially for language packs there is a certain need for short-term breakage, however it happens way too often for Kubuntu (and I would suppose Ubuntu as well). This prevents sensible QA as well as using the product. One of the most incredible things that happened in the 9.04 cycle were, that the pkgbinarymangler (i.e. the component that is responsible for stripping translations from packages, in favor of the ubuntu language packs) was changed to remove translations from desktop files. Incredible is that no one told the Kubuntu devs beforehand, that no one even tested if that change would cause problems, that this change was done less than a month before release. Such things just can not happen anymore. It is this and a lot of smaller regressions that drain Kubuntu's development performance (change all of upstream KDE's langauge packs to include the proper desktop file .pots is certainly no fun and not done within a couple of minutes). So here comes the list of issues: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ajk6csn6c2vn_0c6d8rp6w I'd like to mention that this page's content is based upon known behaviour, if that knowledge is wrong and the status quo is in fact completely different it is all the better. The document also comes with suggestions on how to solve some of these issues, those are really just suggestions of what we think might be a good solution, then again we are neither working on Rosetta's code nor do we use it for stuff other than importing, so discussion between people who actually do is probably necessary. I also want to note that this is not meant to insult anyone or anyone's work, it is merely a list of issues that need to be taken care of ASAP in order to ensure that Kubuntu 9.10+ come with as complete translations as possible. However in the long run I recommend Canonical to seek direct advise from upstream (at least for the KDE side of things), they have years of experience in large scale translation and deployment, not using this knowledge to improve the Ubuntu translation process would be a waste. Maybe invite some upstream translators to UDS (sometime)? Anyway, enough said for now. Please take a look at the document and give it a thought. regards, Harald
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