Summary

• Survey Summary

Results

• SurveyResults.xls

• SurveySummary.pdf

Questions

Which Ubuntu translation team are you coordinating?

1. Bulgarian
2. Telugu
3. Portuguese
4. Dhivehi
5. Asturian
6. Belarusian
7. Hebrew
8. Icelandic
9. Macedonian
10. German
11. Irish
12. Kazakh
13. Norwegian
14. Afar
15. Gujarati
16. Spanish
17. Hungarian
18. Sinhala
19. Arabic
20. Northern Sotho
21. Japanese
22. Finnish
23. Maori
24. Greek
25. Shuswap
26. Frisian
27. Tamil
28. Korean
29. Estonian
30. Lojban
31. Lithuanian
32. Silesian
33. Occitan
34. Ukrainian Translators
35. Simplified Chinese
36. Tibetan
37. Low German
38. Brazilian
39. Russian
40. Dutch
41. Catalan
42. French
43. Khmer
44. Luxembourgish
45. Galician
46. Traditional Chinese (Taiwan)
47. Basque
48. Slovenian
49. Uyghur
50. Swedish
51. Danish
52. Italian
53. Romanian

How many active translators does your team have?

How usable do you think Ubuntu is in your language?

Comments

• "From the Ubuntu point of view input method are excellent. The only problem is that in Ubuntu we have the support for the official Romanian keyboard layout, but unfortunately, the Romanian hardware keyboard are not popular here and most users have US, UK, DE ...etc keyboards. This makes the things a bit harder... but this is not Ubuntu fault."
• "The permanent/occasional ubuntu translators form a subset of a larger group working on several upstreams too. Its size is not well-defined. The ""excellent"" rating may be a bit optimistic for terminal applications and particularly upstream documentation."
• "The input method used mostly by Taiwanese is ""chewing"". It is buggy, unstable and not being actively maintained for a long time."
• ,"for real testing, the lb locale is missing"
• "I am referring to GNOME, which main dialogs are translated."
• "We sincerely hope that zh_CN can be added into Live CD."
• "I still don't know how to modify the proposed Occitan keyboard, what a pity. Otherwise, developers still develop faster than we translate :-("
• "The language packs aren't included by default, which is a concern."

• "There is no Frisian glossary or spell in Ubuntu. The one who install Frisian in ubuntu can't get spell in OpenOffice or FireFox unless when they install an add-on. see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/language-pack-fy/+bug/562363"

• "We don't have any applications translated except for a locale, but we do have many fonts to choose from and a good keyboard."

• "We keep the localisation of GNOME near 100% with each release, http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/el We just recently completed the translation of the Ubuntu-specific programs (some did not make it in the 10.04 deadline). We are in the process of fixing issues in the translations such as obscure mistranslated phrases."

• "Maori uses the Latin alphabet and macrons, so very little is needed beyond translations."
• "Remaining I18N hurdles are visible, and still give an impression of a bit unfinished product. Boot messages and X safe mode prompts probably the most visible."
• "Not enough translation of documentations, because of the priority(translation of Applications first), and less motivated members of documentation translation."
• "The team is stilll starting out so it is not yet that much active"
• PM,"many of the translators lack the technical knowledge, and has little awareness about the whole translation process. many of them does this just because they love their language. it would be better if knowledge about these matters could be given as for a non-technical person. it would greatly increase the effectiveness of the whole translation process."
• "This is good concept of survey to take direct opinion from translations teams. I need some Support for making group perfectly to be recognize for Managing ubuntu gujarati(gu) translation, even i had done 25% loco Gujarati(gu) translation but also want to Translate Ubuntu translations to Gujarati."

• "RTL typing has many issues, both Hebrew and Arabic suffer badly from display and typing issues Although I managed to fix some of the translation mistakes there are still many, it will take a lot of time to make the translations perfect, Since Hebrew is a gender specifi language, a friend offered today to add another Locale for Women (Most of the translations today refer to men only) There are not many Hebrew fonts, there are some but I don't think that's enough Hebrew KDE is not maintained at all and there are almost no contributors at the moment I personally took charge of GNOME and Ubuntu, otherwise there were almost no translators Firefox is maintained pretty good LXDE is maintained by me but its not a tough work at all Flash has RTL issues as well, some with text input and some with Hebrew display (Hebrew is reversed in YouTube with Linux) I can add more upon personal request"

Are you aware of the new policies for Ubuntu translation teams?

Are you subscribed to the Ubuntu translators mailing list and follow the Ubuntu Translations announcements?

Has your team got a Moderated or Restricted membership policy?

Comments

• "We were trying to get as more people as possible to get involved. And now we're looking for co-admins and moving to a Moderated team."
• "The original goal of our team is to have as many people helped with the translation as possible. Now the team is getting bigger and bigger, but most of the member don't contribute actually. So I am considering to change to a Moderated policy recently."
• "No regular contributors yet."
• "Our team is very informal an very new. No real infrastructure or policies exist, only some recommodations/guidelines concerning translation quality."

Does your team's Launchpad page have updated information on the team's purpose and how to contact its members?

Does your team have translation guidelines, and are they linked to the team in Launchpad?

Comments

• "I informed some translation rules to members using mailinglist."
• "No time for writing it. But another translation group is elaborating one so we intend to share this guidelines."
• "Not yet, but working on it"
• "Now not, but will do it later"
• "There are guidelines on separate site (not Ubuntu-specific). I'll fix this."
• "Translation Guidelines are there but not linked to the team in Launchpad."
• "We haven't developed any guidelines."
• "Not enough translated vocabulary yet."

• "Because my team is not recognize to Managing gujarati(gu) language thats why, it is not showing here https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/ubuntu-translators so i cant set Guide line for that."

• "Well its hard to put guidelines on a very small team. Id prefer to not dictate it and let the translations come in whatever form the others want."
• "We have an email with a set of rules that we're sending to anyone interested in contributing. So far there was no interest or resources to bring up a wiki or some other documentation system."
• "There are several guideline pages, Now we are currently working on a main guideline that will appl"
• "We've no guidelines yet"
• "it's a job that is still pending in our team"
• "There are guidelines but they are not linked to the team in Launchpad."

Which communication channel do you use to coordinate translation activities?

Comments

• "IRC is only occasional, the official channel is the mailing list"
• "Wiki"
• "none at the moment - as the team has just been renamed to adhere to the new naming sheme At the moment, i'm checking the different options to see what fits best."
• "IRC meetings once a month"
• "Personal emails."
• "Jabber"
• "mailing list ubuntu-l10n-fin. forum forum.ubuntu-fi.org. irc #ubuntu-fi-tiimit."
• "Wiki :List and check status of translation packages. Twitter :Some translators communicate on twitter about translation etc."
• "Since the group is still young I was in contact individualy via personal email"
• "We were lately aware of the lauchpad mailing lists and will start to use them now."
• "We have a mailing list but its fairly quiet ive been meaning to get more movement on it."
• "We used to use a Forum which is no longer active. We were also heavily using jabber."
• "We are so few that the core members (3 to be exact) contact each other via personal mail"
• "Face to face meetings"

• "We use a Google group (which I created): http://groups.google.com/group/ubuntu-bulgarian-translators"

Does your team use any methods to keep track of translation problems in your language?

Comments

• "see previous comment"
• "IRC"

• "Monthly physical Meeting & Occasional IRC meeting."

• "Upstream translation projects for the Greek language (such as GNOME and KDE)"
• "Launchpad only if someone happens to report a bug against language pack or something."
• "Havent encountered such problems yet"
• "I presume if there are any problems the person who finds them would fix it on launchpad themselves. Most of the users are the ones doing the translations."
• "also direct e-mail between persons"
• "We don't get much feedback, to be exact, we need to beg the users for feedback, once in every few months someone is kind enough to tell us that there is a translation mistake and sometimes there are news articles posted in Israel saying that the translation is unusable (actually its the author's opinion, the other magazine are pretty excited with the Hebrew translation)"

What's the process of accepting new members to your team?

Comments

• "We have two teams. One is free to join by anyone, but can only suggest translations. The other can change translations. So people who are in group one can get into group two by invitation. We got this tip from Romanian team."
• "We created a launchpad team 'Ubuntu Greek translators starters' which we ask new translators to pick first. When they show some translation results, we move to the translation team."
• "We always approve as of yet,"
• The only sane method at the moment is moderated. We use ""reading comprehension test"" for rough filtering, ie. our front page asks for the person to fill in some translations background information on Launchpad home page, in addition to basic other requirements. If the applicant didn't read any information at all, and hasn't done any translation suggestions, we politely decline the membership request and ask to read the instructions and fill in details and/or do translation suggestions."
• "we use a simple questionnaire to have an idea of the applicant's language and translation abilities"
• We do a small check to see they just arent spamming the join request to get in other than that its open."
• "Its far more complicated than that, after we already know how good this translator is we still test him and keep an eye on him"

Do you run translation jams or other translation events?

Comments

• "Translation sprint (occasionally) on IRC"
• "No, but we should."
• "I haven't had time, but would like to."
• "Sometimes we have had eg. documentation translation sprint or DDTP translations."
• "Not yet. Still hunting for potential members"
• "We haven't managed to organize such events like translation jams which are open to everyone yet, but we have Team Meetings once a year at the German Ubucon Conference."
• "We don't have many tranlators"
• "For 3 main members? I don't think that's necessary, the 3 of us are also working on a project called Gezer that should unite all the Open Source Hebrew translators and set some guidelines for Hebrew translations"

How does your team review Ubuntu translations?

Comments

• "That's quite a threat that people not knowing the basic translation knowledge translate directly without leaving them to others to review."

• "We translate upstream to GNOME & KDE. Ubuntu specific packages at Launchpad."

• "We mostly translate offline and review later."
• "Also we get a lot from the kde and gnome upstream."
• "If we are not sure about a string, we review them and first submit suggestions, but if we're sure that the translation is right review them later"
• "Some translate on LP, others use TM software"
• "We don't have enough resources to review"

How do you coordinate translations with upstream?

• "But wish to do all upstream work in upstream"
• We are trying to coordinate wth the basque translator coordinator of gnome."
• "It depends on which project."
• "We mostly translate upstream, but translate in LP what automatic imports have lost or mixed up and then the ubuntu specific patches."
• Most members translate only in Launchpad. A few of the more advanced translators do more of the upstream and also send/commit back improvements by others, especially if big work was done."
• "the problem is that our members lack the technical knowledge and how the whole process of translations go on. (some does not know what upstream means either)"
• "We do not translate ""upstream projects"", we ask translators to join the upstream projects instead."
• I have had contact with the Gnome upstream and he is doing translations and pulling them from launchpad himself when he can."
• "We have really great German Upstream Translators, so that our Ubuntu Team usually only translates Ubuntu-specific applications and documentations. We collaborate with the Upstream by using the same guidelines, forwarding bugs and discussing translation improvements that may effect Upstream applications."
• "We upload the old translations of Gnome from Launchpad to l10n.gnome.org , but our most important target us to trans"
• "We usually work on upstream, several translators work only in launchpad, the rest take care of GNOME and other popular apps (Launchpad also contain some upstream itself)"

Is there any particular area related to your team or language in which you need advice or help?

• "Sometimes is very difficult to maintain a good synchronization with upstream translations. It would be great to have a mechanism to submit the changes to the upstream projects."
• "At the moment, I'm very busy at my jub and have only limited time to run the team. Theoriginal intend of startin the team was to actually get translation to luxembourgish going, as only a few fragments of applications where translated and a long gone mozilla translation project was the only effort i had seen till that day."
• "The file structure (pot, po, git, svn etc.) is very complicated. It's a lot of reading. A summary and clear overview on one page might be of help."
• "Yes, the ubuntu Low German mailing list needs to be created finally, since the request for the list creation is many months ago!"
• "Information about how to set up nightly langpack building in a per translation team basis should be provided centrally."

• "We need clear separation of GNOME - KDE - XFCE & Ubuntu specific packages at launchpad."

• "I would like help organizing a translation day."
• "How do I advertise my group?"
• "yes. We would greatly appreciate if we could get help on technical knowledge about the whole translation process. since many of us(including the members) just translate in launchpad and that's it. many does not know what happens in the background. And some also find it difficult with program codes (e.g. variable placeholders) placed in between translation strings. it would be better if proper knowledge about these matters could be given."
• "Revision lists: what applications been (manually) translated the last few days. And preferably the individual strings."
• "I really need help to set IRC channel for my team and forum also, and don't have much idea about upstream, i'm new here but i'll help Ubuntu as much as possible. And Special Thank to you for this survey because of this i notice certain thing. :)"
• "Let me get back at you about this, The core translators are highly professional The only thing we really need some help with is the user feedback which we don't know how and where should we get..."
• "How can the changes to the existing translations in Launchpad (made by Launchpad members) be tracked more easily?"

Is there anything else you'd like to add, not covered by the previous questions?

• "Gettext comments must be supported by LP, preferably yesterday. Seeing strings without context is sometimes bad, but not being able to write the context after researching - that's much worse. This includes comments to the po-file header."
• "We are just starting with a series of meetings in person once every month. We believe it's very beneficial if people can meet and discuss things in person. It also emphasises team building. We also invite upstream (Gnome and Kde) people to improve collaboration. We believe this is a great thing to have and highly recommend it to other translations teams (if it's doable)"
• "In open team with big members, it is better to set the translator role as default than reviewer role."
• "It would be easier if the files to translate on Launchpad were in alphabetic order."
• "I think it should be easier for translators to become an ubuntu member. Just a bulk of translations should be enough to become a member / show the membership meeting commitee that the applicant is worthy to become a member, without being active in coding for example, when he / she isnt technically able to do that. translations in EVERY language are important and should be honoured by the commitee with the ubuntu membership. rejecting applicants in this field can easily lead to the idea of those, not to participate furthermore!"
• "There should be PPAs with nightly translation builds per language team against what bugs can then be opened. The current way of building them should be made better, mildly said. When a distribution is released the interval of official langpacks should be shorter, at least in the beginning."

• "What I would like to see is a comprehensive page that, for each Ubuntu release, shows 1. those packages that are translatable in each upstream project (GNOME, TranslationProject (such as libc), Debian, Independent, etc) 2. those packages that are translated in Launchpad. 3. Any other messages that are translatable in a different way. It would be great if we had a report page that puts figures on the exact translation percentage of packages."

• "Possible problem points in the current system like QA and upstream collaboration have nicely been covered in other places."
• "Yes I would just like to apologise and comment on behalf on my group. The group isn't much active yet and I am busy most of the time as I am in university. When I am at home I only have internet when I go to the internet cafe so it makes the team even slopier. But since I am home now I will look for more potential members."
• "We have one administrator in launchpad not actually doing anything else than being a proxy. And I do not like the ""single point of failure"" approach. We should probably have an internal discussion about that."
• 13,Jun 23 2010 5:00 AM,"no"
• "Its hard to get people excited about a minority language but I have gotten contact from a journalist and he is interested in doing an interview about Irish translations. So hopefully that will get some help from native speakers in Ireland."
• "Lack of support and complete indifference mainly from the institutions and the government which are using Ubuntu in Macedonian in all of the primary and secondary schools in the country is probably one of the biggest problems we're facing. They need the translations to be consistent and up 2 date, but they simply don't care about the process and the decaying of the translations. The team has been inactive for a few years now and even though we tried to find someone willing to continue the work several times on public foss community mailing lists, through blogs etc etc so far, we were unsuccessful."

• "Is the TemplatesPriority up to date? We also need some help regarding CLI apps, since vte does not support RTL languages (Konsole does) the CLI translated apps are giving us a real hard time, we need some way to mark the strings or templates that appear in CLI and make sure the user does not translate them Another problem we have is the ""schemas"" in GNOME, the GNOME translators forbid translating the ""schemas"" strings, is there any way we can mark them as non-translatable as well? Some CLI apps are translated in TranslationProject and everytime we override the translation in Launchpad the Hebrew translation comes back and overrides the English copies strings, is there any way we can get help removing the Hebrew translations that come from Translation Project? Is there any way we can mark strings that appear in CLI so they won't be translatable?"

Would you agree with your answers or part of them being published online (e.g. the Ubuntu wiki)?

58 teams agreed to have their answers published and 13 teams did not want them published or did not explicitly answer that question. These 13 responses were not included in the final results.

CategoryTranslations