From kde-i18n-doc  Wed Jul 12 08:14:51 2006
From: Vedran Ljubovic <vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:14:51 +0000
To: kde-i18n-doc
Subject: Re: Rosetta for Edgy and KDE [Was: Rosetta for Kubuntu Dapper and KDE]
Message-Id: <200607121014.51158.vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=115269232105891


Hello,

Thanks for responding.

On Tuesday 11 July 2006 22:10, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 08:14:55PM +0200, Vedran Ljubovic wrote:
> > The thing is, Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) don't care the least bit about
> > that! They are working to improve their distro and don't care what
> > happens to other distros / upstream.
>
> We care very much about upstream.

It is nice to hear that you are interested in helping us, at least in 
principle.

> You are free and infact encouraged to take translations from Rosetta
> and import them into KDE.

You make it sound like something trivial. Unless there are some shortcuts that 
I couldn't see, this involves:
- visit launchpad every day to see what's new, swallow some Ubuntu propaganda 
in the process
- wade through the list of translated files that doesn't appear to be sorted 
in any meaningful way, mixing files from KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu (latter two 
obviously don't interest me)
- export each file so that it gets sent to my email
- make a diff to my local repository and investigate every single string to 
see what exactly was done, because there is no way to be sure that Rosetta 
translations are more complete from what I have
- for every useful string, make a copypaste to KBabel window

Now imagine doing that for 5-6 major distributions. Also add that I personally 
maintain translations for a few projects except KDE.

Jonathan, you seem to see only the best case where a translator works on 
previously untranslated file on Rosetta and immediately pings the maintainer 
to import it into svn.kde.org. How about the worst case scenario? When a very 
large file, like kstars.po, gets *partially* translated on Rosetta and 
*partially* translated on svn.kde.org at the same time only in different 
parts? You honestly expect me to Kompare the 700+ kB files with 5000+ strings 
and copypaste relevant strings into KBabel? It's easier to just translate the 
file again.

And yes, that kind of thing happened to us.


> > (Yes, our team was harmed by Rosetta as well)
>
> Could you give some details of this?

You can see in Launchpad logs, if there is such a thing. Some 3-4 young 
translators decided to work using Rosetta and translated a bunch of files. I 
asked them several times not to do that but they wouldn't listen. Then I 
showed them files that were already translated some months ago... needless to 
say they were furious. Now I'm trying to get them into translation the proper 
way but they're just not interested anymore.

For a small team like Bosnian that is a huge loss. 

Now I might not have the best people skills, but it's no wonder that people 
get disenchanted with the whole FOSS translation process when things like 
that happen! Rosetta harmed bs team directly by creating discord among team 
members and driving them away from translation as a whole.

>
> Jonathan

-- 
Bosnian l10n Team
http://l10n.linux.org.ba