Duplicated work in Rosetta/Debian -- how to avoid

[Daniel Nylander]

Tim Morley wrote:

> A colleague has translated some of the Debian installer, and his work 
> has been picked up and added to Rosetta. Some other people have added to 
> and corrected his work within Rosetta, but he wasn't aware of it, and 
> he's since carried on translating at home, duplicating some of the work 
> done in Rosetta, and not benefiting from the corrections in Rosetta.


I spent over 4 months translating the installation-guide for Debian.
Now I see that it has been picked up in Rosetta. But only about 50% 
(lots of changed strings, I guess).


> Question 1: What's the best way to merge the two existing versions (from 
> Rosetta, and from his work done privately)?


What I know, there are no such mechanisms.
I prefer translating for upstream directly and physically fight of the 
Rosetta translators from making changes directly in Rosetta.
These changes must reach upstream.


> Question 2: More importantly, what's the best way to avoid this in the 
> future?


Good question. I would also like to know this.

Qualify assurance is lacking in Rosetta. All translation teams have 
their own manual rules and routines.
The Swedish team (which I'm part of) has some sort of routines but the 
main behavior is to aggressively jump on all untranslated strings who 
they can find and make (in my opinion) a bad translation (not having 
enough background information about the application or the jargon used 
previously in the translation).. and certainly not test the translation.
Of course, this does not apply on all teams.


> NB The answers are probably going to include the words "upstream" and/or 
> "downstream", and I'd be grateful for a 30-second Dummies Guide To What 
> Upstream & Downstream Mean in the context of Rosetta/Launchpad.

Maybe someone from Rosetta/Canonical can explain?

Daniel

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