This page lists all the technical projects that would benefit translators, but need engineering power. Those are the three main technical projects I can think regarding translations (the translation portal and statistics system being less essential and less time saving) We also need help for the technical side of the translations portal (reinstall our statistics module, refresh it..). To get an idea of all the technical and administrative stuff, have a look at https://trello.com/board/translations-team/4f621c87861db54230b9ca39
Automate painful tasks
Language Pack refresh.. Ask the Ubuntu Translation coordinators what takes them most of their time
Automate Description Translation Sync with Debian
For instance, we need right now people to write an export script to share back our translations with Debian on the Package Descriptions.
Develop a useful Translation Portal
The blue-sky vision is that it should have a blog, static content, visually integrated tools (nightmonkey, statistics)
Enable international team engagement by fixing and extending the Translation Statistics Online Tool
The idea was to replace the single HTML page with the translations stats web app [1] I had running a while ago.
However, both (the single HTML page and the Django-based web app) rely on a daily export (i.e. database dump) of translations stats to work.
A while ago that translations export was stopped, as the Launchpad policy is that such functions need to be part of Launchpad itself. Thus the stats are frozen at that point in time, which is the main reason why I took the web app down.
In order to get exports back up and running I submitted a merge proposal to include it in Launchpad [2], but it still needs some extra work (mainly a database patch to unblock it). I was doing this on my spare time, and unfortunately since then I've not had the chance to look at it.
If someone would step up and give a hand with that, that'd be awesome, as from the feedback I got, translators were finding those stats useful, and once that data would be on the webapp, that'd open a world of possibilities [3]. Think automatic weekly reports on translation progress, as an example.
[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~dpm/launchpad/translations-exporter/+merge/124373 [2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-translations-stats [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-translations-stats/+bug/1056190
Both projects would save hundreds or thousands of hours for all teams, and greatly improve all teams' capacities to provide translated descriptions in the software center.
Enable massive progress in Package Descriptions Translation by automating machine suggestions for all languages
Another project that is more of a strech goal would be to automate our process to provide automated suggestions (that we did for French) to all other languages (we're talking of even more saved time). http://lite.framapad.org/p/ddtpUbuntu
Enable massive progress in Package Descriptions Translation by integrating it with Synaptic, Software Centre, Application Lens and apps.ubuntu.com
Enable massive progress in Package Descriptions Translation by integrating it with Synaptic, Software Centre, Application Lens and apps.ubuntu.com. Adding a button « Translate this description » that would link to Nightmonkey by passing the name of the package and the repository as variables.