Sat, 11 Mar 2006

Quant a Ubuntutu

Embarrasing enough, Ubuntu has shipped a Catalan translation for the very prominent About Ubuntu GNOME Panel menu entry which read “Quant a Ubuntutu”. It’s been there for so long that irazuzta and I really considered not fixing it at all for “hysterical raisins”.

Anyway, seb128 now has a patch to correct this at long last in Ubuntu’s gnome-panel. He promised to include it in monday's 2.14.0 upload… seb: DON’T FORGET!

In the meanwhile, Jordi Irazuzta and I just finished setting up the Ubuntu Catalan Translators team, with the mailing of some detailed instructions on how we want to get work done in the team.

It's been months of planning and designing a workflow to make a Ubuntu translation team and the openness that Rosetta offers to all the members of a team fit in Softcatalà’s high standards for the quality of the translations made by the organisation.

As soon as people start mailing back and get subscribed to the team’s mailing list, they'll get tasks assigned and we'll get the team kickstarted, with lots of work to be done before the Dapper release. The key for this team’s success is that we educate our volunteers to contribute their Ubuntu translations to the upstream projects or relevant Catalan teams, and that this is somehow coordinated. The experience will be quite good for me to identify some of the “social” problems with Rosetta, as many times people ask if their translations for Ubuntu will appear in other distributions as well.

The team is led, for now, by Jordi Irazuzta, lo noi de l'Ebre, and me.

If you're a Catalan Ubuntu user and want to lend a hand, you're more than welcome to join the mailing list to help, and become a Ubuntaire!

I've wanted to add the missing Lithuanian translation for "About Ubuntu" for a long time now, but I cannot find it anywhere!  The gnome-panel-2.0.pot file I got from Rosetta doesn't even contain the word Ubuntu.

Any clues?  (I was also unable to find the msgid for the System menu.)

Posted by Marius Gedminas at Sat Mar 11 19:54:19 2006

Marius, have a look at the ubuntu-about.desktop file in the debian/ directory of the source package.

You'll find a list of translations, which is still missing Lithuanian!

To fix it, file a bug against gnome-panel in malone, I'm sure Sébastien will fix it.

Posted by Jordi at Sat Mar 11 21:34:24 2006

The Ubuntu German Translators team could definitely use some of that structure you have there. We have a lot of contributors, but we're not profiting from it because quality suffers and reviewing takes a lot of time. I guess it's even more difficult to introduce a workflow like you described in an existing team.
Probably the whole reason why Softcatalà exists is that such a small language needs a close-knit community. The big languages always had enough translators; so they never set up any structured organisations, and now we're suffering from it.

Posted by Julian Turner at Sun Mar 12 02:34:16 2006

The Ubuntu German Translators team could definitely use some of that structure you have there. We have a lot of contributors, but we're not profiting from it because quality suffers and reviewing takes a lot of time. I guess it's even more difficult to introduce a workflow like you described in an existing team.
Probably the whole reason why Softcatalà exists is that such a small language needs a close-knit community. The big languages always had enough translators; so they never set up any structured organisations, and now we're suffering from it.

Posted by Julian Turner at Sun Mar 12 02:34:30 2006