translations

After doing some more experimenting with translation workflows, our Master of Translation Daniel "al" Albers has agreed to support Transifex as an additional means to create and maintain translations for Quassel. Thus, people not having or wanting a Launchpad account can use the Transifex portal for contributing translations now!

Since we're not dependending on Ubuntu downstream for managing the translations at Transifex, we are a bit more flexible when it comes to working with contributors, and we can sync the codebase with it more easily and more often. Please do check the other system though before starting, in order to not needlessly duplicating work.

al will integrate translations from both systems into Quassel, so we're not abandoning Launchpad/Rosetta, just providing an alternative.

In short, you can now use the following two frontends for helping Quassel be international:

Transifex - the open translation platform
Launchpad/Rosetta - Ubuntu Translators

Thanks for listening again, and I'm looking forward to seeing our po/ folder fill up! ;-)
~ Sputnick

As mentioned in the previous article, we've been trying out Launchpad/Rosetta for translations for the past few months. It took us a while to get the workflow right, since Qt still uses its own translation format that nothing else uses, and conversion is shaky; but Daniel "al" Albers with some help from Kubuntu translation expert David "dpm" Planella have gotten it working at last. Thanks!

The results have been encouraging; we have quickly gained several new languages, and existing translations have been improved thanks to the Kubuntu translation teams.

However, we also still have several contributors that prefer using their own tools over having to register at Launchpad, and would like to continue to send in translations as patches. Good news: al is willing to handle those and merge them with the Rosetta contributions! It would be best to send them to <translations at quassel-irc org> as that gets straight to the correct person. Please make clear which branch your translation applies to, so we can make sure to apply it correctly!

After we have merged your translation, it will also be included in Rosetta with the next package upload, overriding whatever was there before. We'd suggest having a look at Launchpad first though, to check which languages are already being translated and avoid duplicating work. Or poke us in IRC and ask beforehand, if it makes sense.

Thanks to all of you helping to make Quassel awesome in many languages!

Update: Fixed the mail address that was eaten by Drupal, and also removed some false information about Rosetta branches (looks like it points to master now, rather than the stable branch).

Update 2: Fixed Rosetta links

Update 3: We now also support translations via Transifex. Please read the followup blog entry for more details.

This is primarily a message for our current translators.

Daniel "al" Albers has finally managed to figure out a workflow how to correctly handle .po (gettext) files for translating Quassel (a non-trivial problem, since Qt stupidly insists in using its own format). Now that Quassel uses what the rest of the world uses, this also means that we now enable the use of standard tools for translating.

It so happens that Quassel has now been imported into Rosetta, Launchpad's (Ubuntu's) tool for managing translations. Which is cool, because in the two days it's been sitting there, we can already see a ton of new translated strings, plus it looks like we are getting heaps of new languages up to fun things like Colognian or Low German...

But this also means that there will be a change in our current way of handling translations. Until now, various cool people have been sending translations patches directly to us, maintaining a dozen of languages that way. In the future, this probably will have to happen via Launchpad. We are still figuring out a workflow how to get the Rosetta translations back upstream, but it certainly is our intention to do that, rather than letting Ubuntu maintain their own set of language packs.

If you helped with translating Quassel before, please wait with further work until we have put all the pieces together. We wouldn't want you to duplicate work, or do work that gets invalidated later. So far, your existing translations have been imported into Rosetta, so nothing got lost :) I will come up with a follow-up blog as soon as we have figured out how to handle translations in the future.

Let's answer a few Q&A: