On Saturday 27 May 2006 20:00, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> I wasn't subscribed to the list so I'll answer all points so far in 1
> e-mail.
>
> > When will Rosetta be open source?
>
> When Mark says so, probably a few years yet.
>
(...)

> > As far as I know none of the german ubuntu translators did contact the
> > german KDE team before working on the german translations in unbuntu.
>
> Might be worthwhile contacting them and pointing them to useful
> reference documentation.

Sorry, but I find this really to be the wrong way round. 

Ubuntu should ask the Ubuntu translators to contact respective l10n teams of 
the original projects, as it would be probably much more useful that they 
become part of such teams. (I do not think that this problem is going to be 
KDE-specific; I am sure that GNU would not like either to have a fork of its 
translations.)

>
> > How do I explain a KDE translator that his work is already done from
> > someone else skipping the team processes?
>
> I'm not sure what this is asking, the Ubuntu translation teams will
> have their own processes (being young teams some of them may be less
> mature than in KDE).  You can either ignore their work or take it back
> as best suits you.

Double-ignore is a massive waste of efforts of volunteers and even more if it 
is efforts of professionals.

That is really not a good way to promote correctly localised open-source 
versus closed source (which depending on the language is of different 
qualities  of localisation).

And the end user do not care. If he sees that KDE is badly translated, he will 
think that KDE (but not Ubuntu) is badly translated. (Again this problem woul 
not be KDE-specific.)

>
> > Don't get me wrong, but at the moment this looks more like a parallel
> > community to me.
>
> It is.  Distributions have always had parallel development communities
> than their upstreams.

Sure but distributions do not seem to drop half of the source before releasing 
an application. So why should it be done with translations?

I would find it sad to have to consider Ubuntu's KDE translations to be an 
hostile fork.

>
(...)

>
> Jonathan

Have a nice day!