Translations/YourProject/ImportPolicy

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Revision 7 as of 2007-07-31 08:25:12

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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 reason the current policy to accept product translations, which imposes some rules on the process, has been created. The current policy is what we think will make Rosetta translations as useful as they can be, and upstream authors as productive as possible 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.

In order to import a new product for translation in Rosetta, the requester needs to do the following:

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.

Example mail template

Dear maintainer,

I am interested in translating your application X into the language L, and have noticed you don't have an established translation framework.

I've been translating other programs using Rosetta, an advanced web-based translation portal which is being developed by Canonical (Ubuntu Linux's parent company). Rosetta seems an advantageous choice for small/medium Free Software projects like yours, as it allows you to trivially avoid the legwork involved in making your application available in as many languages as possible.

With Rosetta, you would just need to publish a ''translation template'' -.pot file- via a webform when it best suits you (for example, when your next version is feature complete). Once it is published in Rosetta, it would be made available to a body of dozens of Free Software enthusiasts who would be then able to translate it. When you're ready to release your next version, you would request an ''export' of all the available translations, which you would get in a tar.gz archive.

Rosetta is under development, and features are being added and improved every week. It is and will always be free of charge. For me, it would make translating your application very easy.

You can learn more about Rosetta in <http://launchpad.net/rosetta/>.

Thanks,