Launchpad/Ubuntu Translations should work together with the Translation Project

[Till Kamppeter]

For the Gutenprint project the translations are managed by the Translation Project (TP, http://translationproject.org/). This done by the upstream project to get the translations managed and to find translators for many languages.

I have found out that for the Gutenprint project there is not only translation work done via TP but also through the Launchpad:

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gutenprint

The upstream developers of Gutenprint (and also me as Ubuntu packager for Gutenprint) were not aware of that and so translations done here are ending up in a black hole.

What is missing here is a way of coordinating translation efforts of upstream and of the different distros. Translations are not distro-specific. Simply loading the ,po files from here into the Ubuntu package is a waste of valuable translation work and also a usability ptoblem as translations for the same item in the same software can get different in different distributions.

Launchpad should offer the possibility to

1. merge its translations upstream. For example if an upstream project is managing their translations by the Translation Project (or by KDE's or GNOME's translation services, or by whatever...), there should be a possibility to specifiy this in Launchpad, so that translations get exchanged automatically (bug reports can already be connected to upstream bug reports).

2. mark on upstream's request in the Launchpad that all translations have to be done by the translation service chosen by upstream.

This way duplicate translation effort can be avoided and translators on Launchpad/Ubuntu get part of a bigger translator team, represented by the Launchpad/Ubuntu translation initiative.

There are probably many more projects than only Gutenprint with this problem.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

I think this is a dupe of bug 87. Danilo, what do you say? Is there any blueprint to make the upstream/Launchpad coordination better?

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Translations done on https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/gutenprint do not end up in a black hole—they end up in Ubuntu (unless Ubuntu is to be considered black hole). Launchpad is a tool that doesn't provide enough on the front of upstream-downstream collaboration, but there are a lot of plans to improve that (see eg. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/rosetta/?searchtext=upstream), but none of them are high priority at the moment.

One of the core missing pieces is somebody to coordinate the collaboration. The plan to fix that is on the Ubuntu side and is called "hiring an Ubuntu Translations Coordinator". For details on that, see http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_UTC/