(Colin, old horse beaten again..... this time, a thread in debian-i18n, started by Marcos Alvarez Costales, the brand new Asturian translator...who comes from the Ubuntu/LP approach and recently completed the new language process for D-I. Marcos was surprised by the differences in the debian-installer translations in LP and what we offer to translate in Debian) (I wonder if that couldn't be crossposted to ubuntu-i18n) Quoting Marcos Alvarez Costales (marcos.alvarez.costales@gmail.com): > It's similar, but not equal :( > All translation work >> Trash! This is something I discussed numerous times with Colin Watson who, besides many other things, is in charge of handling debian-installer for Ubuntu and manages the synchronizations. It's been numerous years since Colin works on D-I on both "sides" (and for D-I before Ubuntu even existed) and tries to manage the flow. Colin will correct my mistakes but, roughly: What you see in LP as "debian-installer" is the debian-installer package as it was.....at the last synchronization. Syncs are done when Colin needs to release the debian-installer package for Ubuntu in order to prepare an Ubuntu release. Some magic even has to happen later because of the "branding" (the name for the distro here and there) and a few other things that are specific to Ubuntu. From Colin's words this ias always been a slightly hackish system, in general. What we both agree on (don't take it wrongly, we are most often in agreement) is that translating only in LP/Rosetta cannot be enough: - you will be missing strings (some D-I packages are not used in Ubuntu) - you will have fuzzy strings (those where branding happened) - you will need to bring back things yourself in D-I with manual commits So, while you can use Rosetta for the initial work, fine tuning later has to happen in the D-I i18n infrastructure. *That* will later flow back to Ubuntu. Of course, the D-I infrastructure is certainly not as shiny and appealing as Rosetta is....but this is what we have right now and, well, it has proven to work for about sixty languages as of now..:-) The work is not really trashed, that said. As I wrote, when you translate stuff in Rosetta, then manually bring it back to Debian, you'll keep most of your work. But, as of now, you need to bring it back manually. I'm opened to any contribution that would make this more automatic, certainly....contributions welcomed. Another way to work, maybe closer to the Rosetta approach, would be using the Pootle interface at http://pootle.debian.net. This is still considered as quite experimental but a few teams are using Pootle successfully now.
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