Danilo Å egan, lead developer for the Rosetta translation tool sent an email to the Ubuntu translators list yesterday with some great news related to the policy of how upstream translations are managed:

Launchpad Translations has changed the translation precedence policy with the December release: now upstream (“packaged”) translations will be given more priority in specific cases. Yet, Launchpad Translations keeps the ability to override any specific upstream translation if so is desired. To illustrate when upstream translations have precedence, here’s an example: 1. GNOME Panel, message “_Open”, untranslated 2. Ubuntu GNOME Panel message for “_Open” is untranslated 3. Someone translates Ubuntu message in Launchpad to “_Foo” 4. Upstream translates “_Open” to “_Bar” 5. When new upstream translation arrives, Launchpad makes “_Bar” active over “_Foo” (making “_Foo” a suggestion) Example case where Launchpad translation takes precedence is: 1. GNOME Panel, message “_Open”, translated to “Foow” 2. Ubuntu GNOME Panel translation for “_Open” is imported and is now “Foow” 3. Someone fixes translation in Ubuntu to “_Foo” 4. Upstream changes translation for “_Open” to “Foo” 5. When new upstream translation arrives, Launchpad keeps “_Foo” active over upstream’s “Foo”

Danilo also left me a comment on my last post, telling me that Rosetta has supported gettext’s context feature for a while now which, if properly used by the developers, could help giving translators a bit more context information when doing their thing.

I’m so happy that I could literally cry right now!