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Introduction
Rosetta translations are divided in two main groups: product translations and distribution translations.
The main difference between the two is that, right now, product translation templates are uploaded by hand by the product maintainer, while the distribution templates are imported into Rosetta automatically by a script.
Distribution templates get updated all the time, whenever a new package enters one of the distributions being tracked by Rosetta, like Ubuntu Dapper, for example. Distribution templates are optimal translation targets if you want a given distribution release to be very well covered in your language.
Product templates are updated when the responsible person for the product does it by hand, when they think is appropriate (for example, when a release is near to happen). They might be tracking a development branch that isn't yet being used by distributions, or might be the recipient where submitted translations will be used for the next stable release, due in the following three days, which will be used in most of the development versions of the different Free Software distributions.
Importing Products into Rosetta
When someone is interested in having an application -a product, in Launchpad's terminology- translated in Rosetta, they have to request this translation to be setup for the first time. After this initial setup, the product owner will be able to upload new translation templates and new translation files whenever he needs to, without requiring any Launchpad administrator intervention.
In the past, we have been quite flexible when uploading product templates requested by a user. This created some problems with some program authors, which found that their program was being re-translated on Rosetta without them having any notice.
This is the current policy to accept product translations has been created, which imposes some rules to the process, what we think will help us make Rosetta translations as useful as they can be, and upstream authors as productive in the i18n front of their development. It will also help us minimise the chance of getting stale products registered by Launchpad users which at some point are not taking care of updating the files or product information.
This policy is work in progress, and is open to changes. We will review its usefulness and effectiveness in January 2006.
In order to import a new product for translation in Rosetta, the requester needs to do the following:
- Contact the upstream authors of the product, and tell them about his plans. We suggest using the mail template at the end of this page.
If they agree to use Rosetta as their infrastructure for translation, the product will be marked as "Rosetta official", and the upstream author will be the product owner.BRBR Being an "official Rosetta product" means the authors of the product delegate the job of dealing with translations to Rosetta translators. They will just have to post new versions of their templates, and collect the fruits of translator's work before their release.BRBR We also consider products using Rosetta as an auxiliary source of data, which is mixed with the translations they get by other means (directly in their source repositories, etc.). This use case currently fits in the "Rosetta official" group, but should soon have its own category.BRBR
If they don't agree, we won't import the package into a product, as we want to avoid upsetting upstream authors, and inviting people to create some translations that may never get integrated in the official tarballs.BRBR In this case, if that same product exists in the Ubuntu distribution, it will be possible to translate it through the distribution templates. That path only guarantees that the translations will appear in the next Ubuntu release.
- Translations for products belonging to projects with an already established translation infrastructure, such as Debian or GNU, are handled in a special way. In general, requests to import such products won't be accepted unless the translator coordinator for that project agrees on using Rosetta for their language.
In this case, the translator(s) will be added to the relevant translators group, such as ([https://launchpad.net/rosetta/groups/gnu-translators GNU translators], for example), the templates will be imported and will be assigned to this group. Members of GNU Translators will be composed strictly of people already belonging to the upstream translator group, as the [http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gnutra/ Translation Project] (used by GNU projects), and will be added by request of the language's team leader.BRBR KDE and GNOME will be always imported automatically from the data in their CVS/Subversion repositories, and the product templates will be assigned to [https://launchpad.net/rosetta/groups/gnome-translation-project/ GNOME translators] and KDE translators, respectively. Again, only people who are members of the KDE and GNOME official translation teams will be able to commit translations to those products. Other contributions will be accepted into the database as "Suggestions", which might or might not end up appearing in GNOME or KDE releases. The automatic mass-import of upstream KDE and GNOME is being planned, but isn't implemented yet.BRBR This allows some language teams to use Rosetta without opening the doors to duplication of work for the rest of the teams.
For those distribution translations to be picked up by upstream authors and integrated in their repositories, Ubuntu maintainers need to send them directly to them, or they can download them from Rosetta if they want. The most effective way is to have someone from the upstream team taking care of updating the templates regularly in a launchpad product.
Unresolved issues
- Missing: mail templates to contact upstream authors
