NOTE: This document is a work in progress.

Rosetta is an easy-to-use web interface allowing translation of many software projects.

Ideas

• Everyone can use it (web-based)
• Status overview
• Translation suggestions!
• Distro-level support (i.e. work irregardless of upstream)
• Language packs (immediately available in next language-pack update for Ubuntu)
• Automatic imports/updates from upstream
• Upstream per-project
• Upstream per-language-team
• Review/control/restriction of translation
• Import/export

Web Experience

Rosetta is designed to be easy to use and accessible to everyone. You don't need to learn anything you don't already know: you update translations by browsing through web pages listing available programs and distributions, and go straight to updating translations using your web browser.

This means Rosetta runs from any operating system, and you don't need to install anything on your existing system.

At the same time, Rosetta is a live system, and as soon as you submit your translations, they are available to all the other Rosetta users.

Translating Together

Rosetta is used by thousands of users worldwide. That means that using Rosetta for translations will bring you the benefits of many different people collaborating on the same goal of improving translations for your language and product.

This is most obvious in the way translation suggestions work. Whenever someone submits a translation, it also becomes a suggestion to all the other translators for the same string in all the other programs across Rosetta.

When you are not sure about a specific translation, and want to get input from others, you're encouraged to mark your translation as the one needing review: as soon as someone goes over it, they'll either accept it as is, or fix it and enable it.

Status Overview

Whether you are a translator interested only in a subset of languages, or a developer interested in what languages are supported in your product, Rosetta gives you clearly formatted status overviews listing all translations and measure of their completeness.

Status is displayed whenever a pointer to a language or translation is given, which makes it very obvious as to what you can work on.

If you look closely at the status graphs, you'll notice that there are four types of colour indications:

• green is for translations coming from "upstream",
  • i.e. i.e. already provided along with the product when it was added to Rosetta
• blue is for those translations coming from upstream which were
  • modified in Rosetta (eg. typos being fixed, rewordings, etc.)
• purple is for new translations originally submitted through
  • Rosetta: yes, that means your translations!
• red indicates all the text messages which are untranslated or in
  • need of review: these are the ones you can work on in Rosetta!