2008-11-29
Re: Silly translations
In Silly translations, Gintautas Miliauskas wrote about some rather silly translations. This reminded me of a finding by a colleague a few days ago.
He had recently updated his Ubuntu installation to KDE4 (using a german locale). After this, he reassigned a hotkey (to CTRL-SPACE). However, KDE showed: STRG-Weltraum (ctrl-”outer space”) instead of STRG-Leertaste (ctrl-space key) 
UPDATE: Since Frederik (see comments) reminded me of the fact I already knew:
This silly translation is not the fault of the german KDE members, but a bug in the Ubuntu package, which is taking more or less random translations from Rosetta.
See also No related posts
Permalink
Frederik said,
November 29, 2008 at 17:11 UTC (+0000)
Hi,
Kubuntu has a bug in the translation import stuff for their rosetta translation tool for years now that leads to improperly imported oficial translations for KDE. Since their copy of the KDE translation is incomplete, they fill the gaps with user contributed translations.
The translation you mentioned does not come from the official german KDE team.
It is sad that the reputation of ther german KDE team and KDE as a whole has to suffer from that. The Cannonical guys did not really care for the last years. Last week they allegedly fixed one of the bigger importing problems. Let’s see if things become better now.
Regards
Simon said,
November 29, 2008 at 17:23 UTC (+0000)
That’s what happens when random strings from random translators are taken from roseta/launchpad….
sven said,
November 29, 2008 at 21:18 UTC (+0000)
Frederik: You are right, this is definitely NOT the fault of the KDE team, which I already knew when writing the blog entry. I shall really update my post and make that clear.
Jure Repinc said,
December 1, 2008 at 06:30 UTC (+0000)
We have the same problems with *buntu and Slovenian translations. Some are missing completely although the upstream is translated just fine and a lot of them are completely broken. And again if you check out upstream all is fine. Canonical should just close down this Roseta and let upstream do their job properly and with high quality. Roseta should only be used for translations specific to *buntu and only for projects who explicitly want to use Roseta. Current situation only harms Free/Open Source Software and Linux (users getting bad product, translators getting mad and even stoping with translation work), even more so because *buntu is so popular now.
Henning Eggers said,
December 22, 2008 at 12:54 UTC (+0000)
The import of translations for Ubuntu 8.10 were indeed problematic, which happened because of a shift in responsibilities. This has been discussed during UDS and will run much more smoothly for Jaunty so you will see more complete translations there. Also, the next language pack is due in January, so Intrepid will improve, too.
Much has been done to improve translations in Launchpad and it is not possible for random translations ending up in Ubuntu. Ubuntu mostly uses translations from upstream and the Ubuntu community only translates what is specific to Ubuntu. We are currently in the process of implementing the export of these changes to be used by upstream, if desired.
KDE translations are a special case because they use a non-standard file structure. Rosetta has special code to treat these imports but the structure changed again for the last import – so Kubuntu will lack behind, we can only do so much.
Henning
sven said,
December 22, 2008 at 22:08 UTC (+0000)
Henning:
The problem in this case was that Ubuntu specifically threw away existing translations from (KDE) upstream. So Ubuntu does NOT only translate what is specific to Ubuntu. This might not be the sole mistake of Ubuntu, but also partly caused by KDE upstream, but in general, your tools should report problems when an import fails due to file format changes. And more specifically, there should be a few regression tests at least, which detect when previously existing translations are seemingly dropped by upstream (which was not the case here anyway).
I generally welcome the effort Ubuntu puts into translations, but some of them seem slightly misguided.
Sven