Translating your software

Launchpad has unique infrastructure to support the translation of free software into many languages. It enables translation communities to form and be organised (leveraging the [:ReviewersGuide/TeamManagement:Team Management] capabilities described earlier) and allows you to keep track of the translations of multiple versions of your software into multiple languages.

This translation infrastructure is all web-based, so new translators can join very easily, without any special tools or having to be able to commit to the codebase of the project. If you have more advanced translators on your team, however, they can still use specialised tools to work on the standard translation files that Rosetta produces, and they can upload those directly to Launchpad, avoiding the web interface entirely.

Ubuntu uses Launchpad to manage the translation of several hundred packages into many different languages, for each successive release. In particular, once a release has been made, Ubuntu translators can continue to improve translations, which are delivered to users in the form of updated language packs every few weeks.

Keeping track of progress

Each piece of software that can be translated results in one or more "translation templates". You can see the extent to which a particular template has been translated very easily. For example, here is the status of the Gnome Terminal translation in Ubuntu's 6.06 LTS release:

• https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/dapper/+source/gnome-terminal/+pots/gnome-terminal

And part of that page, at the time of writing looked like this:

attachments:translationstatus.png

You can immediately tell which languages are well-translated (green) and which are not. The purple bars represent new translations, added to this system since the package itself was built. It's also possible to see when last someone added to the translation of this template in any particular language, and who that person was.

Contributing translations