It’s incredible to think that more than 57,000 people have used Launchpad to translate software from English into their own language.

Many of them have worked directly on upstream projects, such as the OpenShot video editor. Others have helped translate Ubuntu packages of software. And then there’s a whole group of people who translate upstream software outside of Launchpad.

Today we’ve taken another step in bringing those efforts closer together by making it far easier to get upstream translations directly into Ubuntu.

We want the strings produced by translators working directly on software projects, whether in Launchpad or elsewhere, to be easily available to the Ubuntu translators and we believe it should be just as easy for software projects to take advantage of the work of Ubuntu translators.

How it works

Translation sharing between different releases of a project, or Ubuntu, has been available in Launchpad for some time now. Also, sharing translations between an upstream project translated in Launchpad and its Ubuntu package has been helping to bring those two communities of translators closer together.

What’s changed today is that strings from upstream projects who make their translations outside Launchpad are now just as easily imported and ready for use by Ubuntu.

Now, so long as the upstream project is set up in Launchpad to do this, a change made in an upstream project’s source code — whether hosted directly in Launchpad or elsewhere in Bazaar, Git, Subversion of CVS — will be available to Ubuntu translators just a few hours later.

Previously, Ubuntu took translation templates and files from the source packages as they were uploaded. There was no automated route for those new upstream translations to get into Ubuntu after that initial import. In effect, this allowed Ubuntu translations to diverge from upstream during the six month Ubuntu cycle.

This change has a nice side benefit of making it easier for upstream projects to make use of translation work done for Ubuntu, because the English strings will diverge far less and it will be easier to spot where the Ubuntu community has done new translation work, rather than their being a divergence due to the two efforts drifting apart.

To start with, this is available for projects that use intltools, which includes all of GNOME. To get your project’s translations automatically imported into Launchpad, see our help guide.

Photo by Kino Praxis. Licence: CC BY 2.0

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 4 Summary

Ramping up to the end of the week we had another full app development goodness day, and one where the session topics fitted together in a nice workflow as well: creating bling, creating apps with Rapid Prototyping, getting them into Ubuntu, adding indicator support and translating them. Here’s the report of yesterday’s app development journey:

Qt Quick: Elements/Animations/States

By Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel

The next Qt Quick session was all about creating attractive and usable user interfaces. Jürgen went through the QML tutorial documentation and code examples, showing us how to position elements with anchors, columns, rows and grids. Then onto states and transitions: describing the changes in an element’s properties and how to switch between them. To finalize, the most impressive stuff: QML animations, in which he teached us the different types of animations and how to use them.

Check out the session log here.

Qt Quick: Rapid Prototyping

By Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel

In Jürgen’s words, Qt Quick was designed to bridge the gap between designers and developers, letting both groups to work with the same technologies and code base. He explained how Qt Creator provides a design mode which allows easy dragging and dropping of UI elements, and separation between code and interface. All through a natural and agile prototyping workflow.

Check out the session log here.

Rapid App Development with Quickly

By Michael Terry

Michael started introducing what Quickly at the heart is: a robust yet simple system of templates with boilerplate code and commands. The available templates are ubuntu-application, ubuntu-cli, ubuntu-pygame and ubuntu-flash-game, and on the Natty version, Quickly will feature the ‘submitubuntu’ command to help getting applications into the Software Center. All that being set straight, he then showed how to use Quickly and what it can do: from creating the first example application, to modifying the UI with ‘quickly design’ and Glade, into debugging and finally packaging.

Check out the session log here.

Getting Your App in the Distro: the Application Review Process

By Allison Randal

Linking from the previous session on how to create an app, Allison explained in a very clear way how to get your applications into Ubuntu, so that they make their way into the OS in a matter of weeks instead of having to wait until the next release. The first step is to submit a ticket to the App Review Board, giving them the essential details for the proposal. They’ll then do the initial review, in which one of the reviewers will volunteer to walk you through the process and help you with suggestions or improvements, to bring the app to a state ready for the final review. There the board will vote in a meeting for the inclusion of the application. After the process description she answered the questions from the audience and wrapped up with some useful tips to application submitters.

Check out the session log here.

Adding Indicator Support to your Apps

By Ted Gould

Ted kicked off with an explanation of what indicators are and their intended use: they should not be used just because they are available – rather as a feature for long running applications, those that are more services to users, to expose that functionality. The next step was to describe how to create indicators through libappindicator, with any language supported by GObject Introspection, such as Python or Javascript, and how to add more features to a basic indicator: accessible labels and attention state. After that he described fallbacks, and how platforms not using Unity can nevertheless use indicators. The final minutes were dedicated to the future of indicators, that for now will focus on API cleanup and stabilization, and introspection improvements.

Check out the session log here.

Using Launchpad to get your application translated -

By Henning Eggers

As a follow up to the talk on how to add native language support to your applications on Monday, Henning described the next step: how to make them translatable in Launchpad and grow a translation community around them. In the first part he showed how to set up a demo project using Launchpad’s staging server, and shared some recommendations on how to make sure the application is correctly set up for translations, followed by an overview on some Gettext concepts Launchpad relies upon. From there, it was straight into business: setting up a translatable project in Launchpad, getting translatable templates imported and exposed to translators, creating a translation community for your project and the workflow for translation. A very detailed overview to get your application to talk any language.

Check out the session log here.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 5

The last day and the quality and variety of the sessions is still going strong. Check out the great content we’ve prepared for you today:

16:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Extend with C++ – Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
Sometimes you would like to extend Qt Quick with your own native extension. Jürgen will show you some ways how to do it.

17:00 UTC
Phonon: Multimedia in Qt - Harald Sitter
Harald, as the lead developer of the Qt/KDE multimedia library Phoon will tell you about the awesomeness that Phonon provides and how it achieves ultimate portability, so that it can even run on vending machines. He’ll also tell you hos to create a video player with 3 lines of code (or in 30 seconds without any code) and much more.

18:00 UTC
Integrating music applications with the Sound Menu - Conor Curran
So you’ve seen the slick sound menu in Ubuntu, and you’re developing a multimedia application, right? You’re then wondering how to seamlessly integrate it into Ubuntu and use all the nice features from the menu as well? Wonder no more, for Conor is the man behind the sound menu and he’ll be delighted to teach you how.

19:00 UTC
pkgme: Automating The Packaging Of Your Project - James Westby
Once you’ve developed a cool application you’ll want to package it and distribute it to users so that they can easily install it in their favourite platform. James will show you how this can be both easy and fun letting pkgme do all the work for you.

20:00 UTC
Unity Technical Q&A - Jason Smith and Jorge Castro
You’ve heard about Unity, the new UI concept which is going to improve several orders of magnitude how you interact with your computer in Ubuntu. You are probably using it already, and you’ll surely have questions and will want to learn more about the coolness it brings. Jason Smith, from the Unity development team, and Jorge Castro, from the Community team know all about Unity and they’ll be here to chat with you.

21:00 UTC
Lightning Talks - Nigel Babu
As the final treat to close the week, Nigel has organized a series of lightning talks to showcase a medley of cool applications: CLI Companion, Unity Book Lens, Bikeshed, circleoffriends, Algorithm School, Sunflower FM, Tomahawk Player, Classbot – your app could be in this list next time, do check them out!

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 3 Summary

Right into the middle of the week and still delivering the most diverse set of sessions from the most interesting technologies. QML, Cloud, D-Bus, Multitouch, Unity, Bazaar… Wednesday had a bit of everything. Most importantly, this sessions are for you all, so I was really glad to hear feedback on how people liked the content of App Developer Week! So here’s a new summary for all of those who couldn’t attend.

Qt Quick: QML the Language

By Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel

In his first session, Jürgen gave a short intro to Qt Quick’s QML language and how to use it. The first steps were to install Qt and Qt Creator, followed by a description of what Qt Quick is and how developers came up with a declarative way, similar to CSS or JSON to write in the language. All that clear, he then started with the Qt Quick tutorial and code examples that could be run with qmlviewer, the qml interpreter. Onto the second part, he focused on the QML languate, and going into the detail on how to create custom QML components. There were also lots of pointers to the excellent Qt documentation.

Check out the session log here.

Make your applications work in the cloud with Ubuntu One

By Stuart Langridge

Stuart gave a great overview on how to add the cloud to existing apps and how to make new apps for the cloud, letting Ubuntu One do all the hard work for you: from managing identities, password renewal to sharing data between applications. And all that on the web, the desktop, mobile… all your stuff everywhere! He then showed us some simple code to sync playlists on the cloud, ready for streaming. File sync is also an important Ubuntu One feature apps can make use of for sharing, and he also went through a couple of the many cool ways you can use it. The last mention was on API documentation, something Stuart is working on in this cycle.

Check out the session log here.

Take control of your desktop easily with DBus

By Alejandro J. Cura

In this session Alejandro showed us in a hands-on and easy to follow way different bits and pieces of D-Bus, and how applications in the desktop can communicate through it. He went through real life examples to show how to do simple tasks and explained how they can be achieved with D-Bus.

Check out the session log here.

Touchégg: Bringing Multitouch Gestures to your Desktop

In the second multitouch session of the week, app developer José Expósito started showcasing Touchégg, how it works and its features: recognizing multitouch gestures and getting the most of multitouch devices. He then went on describing which gestures it supports, such as tap, drag, pinch or tap & hold, and the different actions that can be associated to gestures, showing us a really cool video of Touchégg in action. The second part of the talk focused on describing the technologies used to develop Touchégg: uTouch-GEIS, through its simplified interface, and Qt.

By José Expósito

Check out the session log here.

Unity: Integrating with Launcher and Places

By Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen

Mikkel used the intro of the talk to set a couple of things straight: “Places” are going to be called “Lenses” in the next cycle, and libunity does not yet guarantee API or ABI stability. He then followed with the Unity Launcher integration, and how applications can use static quicklists, and more advanced features such as count, progress bar, window flashing and dynamic quicklists. The second part were Places: remote databases that provide data for Unity to render. Through a Python code example he showed us in detail all the aspects of creating a Unity Place.

Check out the session log here.

Tracking Source Code History with Bazaar

By Jelmer Vernooij

Jelmer, in his experience of seasoned Bazaar hacker started off introducing what bzr is: a modern distributed version control system. He then went on with the basics with a hands-on example, going through the creation of a branch, the first commit, and describing several of the most handy bzr commands. As a wrap-up, he showcased more advanced features such as source recipes: scripts that combine branches and build daily Debian packages from them.

Check out the session log here.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 4

We’re featuring a Qt Quick Marathon today: 2 sessions in a row. Following that, how to do RAD with yet another framework: Quickly, how to get your applications in Ubuntu, and how to get them translated in Launchpad. Enjoy!

16:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Elements/Animations/States – Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
Another day and more featured Qt content: this time Jürgen will take us through different elements/animations and states Qt Quick provides, and will show us through examples how to make use of them.

17:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Rapid Prototyping – Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
If one session weren’t enough, here’s the continuation: more Qt goodness, this time a hands-on session to develop a small application from start to finish and experience the whole process from the front row.

18:00 UTC
Rapid App Development with Quickly – Michael Terry
Mike will show you how to write applications in no time with the power of Python and Quickly: bringing back the fun in programming.

19:00 UTC
Getting Your App in the Distro: the Application Review Process – Allison Randal
A while back we created an easy process defining how to get applications into Ubuntu, so in order to be able to add them in a matter of weeks, rather than waiting for the next release. Allison, in her Ubuntu Technical Architect and Application Review Board member hat, will walk you through the Application Review Process

20:00 UTC
Adding Indicator Support to your Apps – Ted Gould
Join the man who knows most about indicators in a session that will teach you how to integrate your application even more into Ubuntu. They’re slick, robust and consistent: bringing indicator support to your apps.

21:00 UTC
Using Launchpad to get your application translated – Henning Eggers
One of the coolest features of Launchpad is that it helps growing a translation community around your project. You can make your application translatable in Launchpad and be able to deliver it into almost any language. Henning will teach you how to do this, picking up where the previous session on translations left.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

We’ve just uploaded fresh language packs in the maverick-proposed repository for testers to check  before they are released to all users. These should contain all updates and fixes in translations done since the last language pack update.

I’d like to ask for your help in testing them and in providing an indication that the test has been done. You can do this very easily by following the instructions here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/LanguagePackUpdatesQA

The deadline for the testing is the 25th of March (in a week’s time). After that, we’ll update the language packs we’ve received feedback for into maverick-updates, so that all users can benefit from the new translations and fixes.

Remember that you’ll have to enable the maverick-proposed repository to start testing. Here’s how:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed

Thanks!

Notes

Remember that now you can subscribe to the iCal feed to stay up to date with language pack updates and better coordinate your work if you are a translator:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/MaverickLanguagePackReleaseSchedule

Notice that as commented on the translators mailing list recently, we’ve experienced
bug 731298. This bug has now been fixed, but for those of you using the language packs PPA, please remember to follow Martin Pitt‘s advice to purge and reinstall the packages for a proper fix:

Note that I can’t automatically fix packages for people who already upgraded to the broken PPA version; they will need to purge the packages (-base as well) and reinstall them.

If you are not using the language packs PPA, you shouldn’t need to worry about this.

Fabien has told me he’ll explain in more detail in a later post, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it in the meantime.

Look at this:

ast     1024
ca         5
cs        80
da        36
de       351
es       538
eu      3457
fi       293
fr        26
gl      3475
he       252
id       116
it        77
ka        98
ku       387
lt         3
nl       227
no        83
pt-BR    437
ro        18
ru       225
sl       537
sr       102
sv       382
ug      3378
zh-CN    537

TOTAL  16144

That’s more than 16000 strings in 26 languages coming from Launchpad landing on Chromium upstream.

Rock on.

Contribute to Chromium translations in Launchpad – if there is not yet a team for your language, you can create one.

Join me tomorrow on a new Translations Training session where I’ll be talking about workflows you can use to provide better quality translations to our already awesome OS. I’ll cover different approaches to reviewing translations and some tips interesting to both experienced and new translation teams.

• WHAT: Ubuntu Translations Training Session: QA Workflows
• WHEN: Thursday, 17 Mar, 16:00 UTC
• WHERE: #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel on Freenode

Remember that if you’ve got any suggestions about a translations topic you’d like to learn more about, you can add it here.

Image: Quality? by dieselbug2007 (CC BY-NC 2.0)

IRC rockstar Jussi Schultink, on behalf of the Ubuntu IRC Council tells me that the Ubuntu IRC Terms of Service are up for translation, so feel free to go to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/TermsOfService and start a new translation in your language.

You’ll find instructions on how to do it at the bottom of the page, so there’s no excuse to make them available in everyone’s language!

Image from http://mardoen.textdriven.com/irc_arcs/ by Martin Dittus

Join me in a fresh episode of Ubuntu Translations TV tomorrow, where I’ll be continuing the series started on the last session and explain what happens to translations when they get out of Launchpad and are delivered to our users for some localized goodness.

Again, this will be a bit technical, but not too much, and it will help everyone understanding the big picture of how translations work in Ubuntu.

As usual, feel free to participate and ask your questions!

• WHAT: Videocast – The Ubuntu Translations Workflow II
  
• WHEN: Thursday, Feb. 17th, 16:00 UTC
• WHERE: Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel

Talk to you all tomorrow!

Note that if you wish to participate in the online chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (you can use your Launchpad OpenID), but I’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode.

As previously discussed,  I’m happy to announce the first in the series of biweekly Translations Training Sessions, starting tomorrow.

So here’s the rundown: we’ll be having a 1 hour IRC session, where you can learn how to use the Launchpad Translations web UI to translate your favourite distro.

• WHAT: Translations Training Sessions
  
• WHERE: #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode
  
• WHEN: Thursday, 3rd February, 16:00 UTC

What will you need?

Not much, really. It would be great if you could create a Launchpad account before joining the session, so that you can get started trying your first translations during the hour, that’d be awesome. You’ll simply need an e-mail address and an Internet connection for that. You’ll find how to do this on the Translations QuickStart Guide.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to easily contribute to Ubuntu in your language and to ask all your questions.

See you tomorrow!

As every two weeks, this Thursday I’ll be preparing a fresh Ubuntu Translations Videocast for all of you interested in knowing more about the exciting world of translating Ubuntu.

I’d like to combine some basic with some more advanced topics, so that the subjects are interesting to both new and experienced translators. This week I’ll be doing a more technical talk (not too much, though) about the translation workflow in Ubuntu and all that happens behind the scenes.

Hopefully this will give you an overview of the whole infrastructure and will help you understand why some of the things are implemented the way they are.

As usual, feel free to participate and ask your questions!

• WHAT: Videocast – The Ubuntu Translations Workflow
  
• WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 27th, 16:00 UTC
• WHERE: Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel

Talk to you all in a couple of days!

Note that if you wish to participate in the online chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes), but I’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode.

?NOTE: this notice affects only translations for upstream projects in Launchpad, and not the translations of Ubuntu packages.

Yesterday’s Launchpad rollout came with lots of translation goodness, such as better upstream imports, of which we’ll talk in more detail very soon.

However, as a side effect and due to a migration script not being run in the Launchpad side, we’d like to ask you to wait a bit to do new translations for upstream projects in Launchpad until we can run this script again and make sure new translations during this time are not reverted to suggestions.

It should take about a day to run the script, and after that you can keep translating as usual. We’ll send a new notice when the run has finished.

Notice that no translations will be lost in any case, but if you do any translation between that period, they will be reverted to suggestions, meaning that you’ll have to re-approve them. We simply ask you not to translate to avoid this temporary situation, and save you the additional effort.

In summary:

• Please refrain from translating upstream projects in Launchpad until further notice (in about a day’s time).
• We only do this to make sure new translations are not reverted to suggestions and to save translators effort. No translation loss will happen in any case.
• We’d like to ask you to forward this notice to your translation teams.
• This does not affect Ubuntu packages. You can keep translating Ubuntu as usual.

As usual, if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ask!

Regards,
David.

Ladies and gents, I’m pleased to announce the next Ubuntu Translations videocast tomorrow from Dallas, Texas, where this week we are holding the Canonical Platform Rally for the next version of Ubuntu, the Natty Narwhal.

This time around I’ll have the privilege to be joined by ??Danilo Šegan (or his alter ego ?????? ?????), the Launchpad Translations developer team lead.

Those of you involved in translations will know Danilo well, not only for his work in developing the translations application in Launchpad, but also for his community involvement. A regular at UDS and GUADEC conferences, he’s also developed and maintained some of the key tools in the Free Software Localization ecosystem, such as xml2po and intltool.

He’ll be explaining all the cool new things coming up in Launchpad Translations, such as better upstream integration, and will also tell us a bit more about other changes affecting the way Launchpad is being developed.

As usual, we’ll be taking and answering your questions, so come and join us for a chat!

• WHAT: Videocast – Launchpad Translations News
  
• WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 13th, 21:00 UTC
• WHERE: Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel

Note that if you wish to participate in the online chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes), but we’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode.

Talk to you all tomorrow!

I talk often about the Ubuntu translations community, and one of the things I get asked many times is how to actually get started translating Ubuntu.

Because of this, and because I want to show everyone how easy it can be, I’ve decided to kick off a series of articles covering the different aspects of translations, starting with the basics.

So here it is: how to start translating Ubuntu, in 3 easy steps.

What You’ll Need

One of the key values in Ubuntu is the low entry barrier for contribution, so that participating in improving Ubuntu can be both easy and fun. Therefore you won’t need much to start translating from day one: there is no need to install special tools and no previous technical knowledge is required. You’ll be using Launchpad, an easy to use yet powerful online translation tool.

Here are the minimum requirements to start translating Ubuntu:

• Internet: a device with Internet connection. This can be from home, a café, a public access point… – basically anywhere you can connect to the Internet from
• E-mail: a stable e-mail address that Launchpad can use to contact you
• Language knowledge: it’s important that you know English and the language you are going to translate into. English will always be the source language for translations
• Spare time: some time to dedicate to the translation of Free Software. You decide how much you want to get involved – from some spare minutes to some hours a week
• Be collaborative: be keen to work collaboratively and be part of the awesome Ubuntu translation teams!

Step 1: Create a Launchpad Account

The first thing you’ll need is a Launchpad account. This will allow you to translate Ubuntu online using an intuitive web interface, and will also give you access to all of the free tools from the Launchpad software collaboration platform.

To create a new Launchpad account, simply go to the account sign-up page, click on the Create a new account link and follow the instructions.

Tell Launchpad About Your Preferred Languages

Once you’ve set up your account, you’ll only need to log in and tell Launchpad which languages you’re interested in translating into.

To set your preferred languages in Launchpad, go to the Launchpad Translations page and click on the Change your preferred languages link. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to start translating.

Step 2: Start Translating

At this point you’ve got a Launchpad account and you’re all set and hopefully eager to start translating. What we need to do now is to find the Ubuntu applications we want to translate, get familiar with the interface and submit the first translation suggestions.

We’ll start by going to the main Launchpad Translations page. There you’ll see that Launchpad allows you to translate two categories of software: Operating Systems and Projects.

We’re interested in translating Ubuntu as a collection of integrated applications, so we’ll go to the Operating Systems category and we’ll click on the latest Ubuntu version.

From there you’ll find your way to the Ubuntu applications and their translatable messages. They are just a couple of clicks away and I won’t explain it here in detail. However, if you want to know more, you can find out in the Ubuntu Translations Quickstart Guide.

The translatable messages look like the one above: they are pairs consisting of original messages in English and translations in your language. In the web UI, English is the original to translate from, Current is the currently used translation, and New suggestion is where you can submit your translation.

Try this: find a message you think you can translate and enter your translation in the text box. Once you’ve done that, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Save button.

You’ve now submitted your first translation suggestion. Congratulations!

You’ll find that the interface is very intuitive and self-explanatory, so try to get a bit more familiar with it before submitting more suggestions.

Tip: If you already know the Ubuntu application you’d like to translate, you can use a quicker way to go to its translation page. Try this: start the application and then go to Help Translate this application…, which will open a browser for you and take you directly to the translation

Step 3: Join a Translation Team

Translating Ubuntu is a rewarding experience: it allows you to bring a localized system in your language to potentially millions of people. This also carries a degree of responsibility: we want to provide the best applications with the best translations around, which is why we put an emphasis on their quality.

Everyone with a Launchpad account can submit translation suggestions. While this is great for collaboration and for lowering the barrier to contribution, it is necessary to have some kind of peer reviewing mechanism to make sure these suggestions are correct and that the final user will understand them when using Ubuntu.

The role of translation teams is to have a set of members who are experienced translators review these suggestions, accept them if appropriate and come back to the submitter for feedback. They also take care of helping new translators get their bearings on their journey to becoming full-fledged Ubuntu translators.

Even if you don’t want to join them, it is always recommended to get in touch with the translation team when you’ve finished submitting some suggestions, so that they are aware of them and they can review them.

To join a translation team you can go to the global Ubuntu translation teams list, and click on the team for your language. On their home page in Launchpad you’ll then find instructions on how to get it touch with them and contribute to translating Ubuntu in your language.

That was it!

You now know all you need to become a full-fledged Ubuntu translator or to occasionally submit translations. If you are interested in getting more involved in the translations community, you can also learn more.

Following the series of blog posts about the Ubuntu Translations plans for the Natty cycle, this week I’m thrilled to report on the Ubuntu Translations Portal, and to announce its initial test deployment.

The idea behind the portal is to aggregate all existing content and to be the main entry point to the translations community for new contributors, providing them answers, inspiration and excitement. For experienced translators it will be a central point for resources and news about translating Ubuntu.

The main goal for this cycle is the deployment of the portal, with an official news feed and planet-like and microblogging feeds, all nicely wrapped in an Ubuntu-Light-based theme. I’m happy to report that we’re doing good progress on this.

So without further ado, here’s a preview of what the portal will look like:

• The Ubuntu Translations Portal test site

Note that as it stands now, this is very much an alpha deployment on an external site, for development and testing purposes. As such, you’ll see that there is not much content, and that that content has been put there to help with development. You’ll also see that the theme still needs work in several parts of the site, but the current state will already give you a good idea of the shape the portal is taking.

Also note that one of the main requirements is that the site is multilingual, so that everyone can see it in their own language. We’ve been setting up the infrastructure for that, so that next cycle we can start translating the portal in all of the Ubuntu languages, but the first iteration this cycle will probably be in English.

Contribute

Do you want to take part in shaping up the Ubuntu Translations portal?

There are many ways in which you can help. Here are just a few:

Discuss. Participate in the discussion, ask your questions and stay up to date with the latest developments and announcements in the portal.

Develop. Have you got web development or web design skills? We need you! Help us developing the theme and infrastructure for the portal.

Report. Have you been using the portal and have noticed any bugs or anything that needs improvement? Report them as bugs in the Ubuntu Translations Portal project in Launchpad.

Write. Do you want to submit articles related to translation, help with content editing or moderation? Join the Ubuntu Translations Portal editors team and put your writing skills to work.

Stay tuned for more updates. Looking forward to everyone’s participation!

Other posts in this series:

• Natty Translations Plans I: Translations Stories
• Natty Translations Plans II: Translations Training Sessions

We all know about Unity, the project that is changing the way we interact with our computer by bringing a consistent user experience and a solid, elegant design for desktop and netbook users.

We want to make sure Unity is for everyone, and one of the key aspects to make it possible is that it is available in everyone’s language.

Unity is already available in more than 60 languages, and can be translated into almost any other. Unity is also Free Software, which means it is in your own hands to make it happen.

So, if your language is not in that list, how can you translate Unity?

• If you are new to translations, you might want to read the Ubuntu Translations Quickstart Guide.
• Next thing you can do is go to the Unity translations page and start translating online right away.
• You can then do the same with the Applications and Files places and translate them as well.
• That’s it! You’ll find that contributing to Ubuntu by translating it is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways you can start

If you’ve got any questions, you can contact the translations team in whichever way you prefer.

We’ve got about 150 Ubuntu translation teams, and I’m pretty sure we can make that by the time Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is released there is a translation from each one of these teams.

Hence, I’m proud to announce the Unity L10N project, stay tuned for more updates and join the translation party!

Following the first in the series of posts about the plans for Ubuntu Translations on this cycle and their progress, this week I’d like to talk about Translations Training Sessions.

What we’d like is to run a series of regular events where translators can just attend and learn, in a hands-on way, all the different aspects of translating our favourite distro. There, they should also be able to ask their questions and discuss any topics related to translations. Another goal is to also provide material for all teams to adapt and reuse for their own training events for new translators.

The plan is to start by running a regular series of IRC training events focused on particular translation topics. Here are some suggestions:

• The Launchpad Translations web interface
• Translating Ubuntu online and offline
• Ubuntu Translations review workflow
• …

Do you want to help grow your translations community in your language? Help us with the training sessions by providing suggestions for topics you’d like to see covered in them. You can also help by running the sessions yourself!

You can leave them as comments on this post or directly on the wiki page we’ve set up for that here.

Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!

After the first Ubuntu Translations videocast two weeks ago, join me tomorrow in a new edition where I’ll talk about the first steps to get you started translating Ubuntu.

So if are either:

• new to Ubuntu and would like to learn more and join the awesome translations community…
• not involved in translations but would like to know more about how Ubuntu is translated…
• an experienced translator that would like to ask questions or share your workflow…

… then this show is definitely for you.

Come along tomorrow and watch the introduction on how to get started, the general translations workflow, and participate by asking your questions!

• WHAT: Videocast - First Steps Translating Ubuntu
• WHEN: Thursday, Dec. 16th, 16:00 UTC
• WHERE: Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel

Note that if you wish to participate in the online chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes), but I’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode.

Talk to you all tomorrow!

I’m very much thrilled to announce that Chromium, the Open Source project behind Google Chrome, the browser that is transforming the way we experience the web, is now open for community translation in Launchpad.

Chromium will be hosting its translations in Launchpad Translations, the collaborative online tool for translating Open Source projects and building community around them.

You can now translate Chromium online into almost any language. Using Launchpad’s simple web interface you’ll only need a Launchpad account, a web browser and good knowledge of English and the language you’ll be translating into.

Under the Hood

For the technically minded among us, here’s an overview of how everything fits together.

But first of all, I need to mention that all this would not have been possible without the fantastic work of Fabien Tassin, the legendary Ubuntu community member of Chromium and Firefox packaging fame. Big thanks also go to Evan Martin from the Chromium project, the Launchpad Translations developers and anyone else involved in making this possible.

In short, after seeing the willingness from the Chromium project to use translations infrastructure in Launchpad, Fabien single-handedly designed and implemented the machinery that performs the conversion between the Chrome translation format and Gettext, the widely-used standard format Launchpad understands.  He did not stop here, and he also devised a way to package these translations and submit them to upstream.

The following diagram illustrates the Chromium translations lifecycle:

Chromium Translations Lifecycle - Diagram by Fabien Tassin

The work is happening between Fabien’s server, where he maintains a local copy of the Chromium upstream branches, and Launchpad, where the PPA builds and translations happen. These are the two big blocks you see on the diagram.

The existing Chromium translations are imported into Launchpad after being converted to the gettext format. The result is then committed in a bzr branch, which is enabled with automatic translation imports to make the translations available through the web UI.

At this point translators can do their work: either complete missing translations, improve existing ones or add new languages.

This work is then committed daily to another bzr branch making use of another cool Launchpad integration feature: automatic translation exports.

The rest of the process is also fully automatic: every day, a bot in Fabien’s server fetches the translations export branch, converts back from gettext to the Chromium translation format, merges that with the upstream trunk and lands the changes in the corresponding PPA of the daily builds. For other branches the process is the same, except that it is only run when there is a new upstream release.

From there, patches with the translations are generated daily for anyone else interested in using them.

Q+A

What does community translation mean?
It means that any Open Source enthusiast will be able to translate Chromium to their language through volunteer contributions.

Why do we need community translations?
Many of the translations already available in Chromium come from private translations originated in Chrome. Until now, Chromium did not have any translation infrastructure to enable the community to localize the software, and therefore some languages were incomplete. In Launchpad you can now a) complete Chromium translations, b) improve them and c) add new languages.

How do I get started translating Chromium?
If you don’t have one already, you’ll need a Launchpad account. Once you’ve created it and selected your prefered languages, simply point your browser to https://translations.launchpad.net/chromium-browser, click on your language of choice, and that’s it, you can now start translating!

?I can submit neither translations suggestions nor translations. How can I translate Chromium?
If you aren’t already logged in to Launchpad, try to log in and see if it helps. If it doesn’t, that’s probably because there is no translation team for your language yet. Launchpad Translations is built around a model of community (in the form of translation teams) and permissions (chosen by the project developer).

The permission model for Chromium is Restricted, which provides a good balance between community participation and translation quality. This means that while everyone can submit translations suggestions, only the members of the translation team will be able to accept them after review.

Have a look at the list of teams in the Launchpad Translators group. If there isn’t one, you should be able to start a new team in a matter of minutes following these simple instructions, which will allow you to start translating Chromium once the team is approved.

When I try to translate my translations are saved as suggestions. Why can’t I directly submit translations?
That’s because you are not part of the translation team for your language. You can look for your language’s translation team here and get in touch with them. If you wish, you can ask them if you can join the team or if they can review your suggestions. See the previous question for more information on translation teams, suggestions and permissions.

How do I get support for Launchpad Translations?
There are many ways to get support if you need help. Here are some of them: you can ask a question in Launchpad, you can send an e-mail to the launchpad-users mailing list or you can ask on the #launchpad IRC channel on the Freenode network. You will find more information here.

Will Chromium translations make it to Google Chrome?
Most probably not. Google Chrome and its translations are subject to different QA processes than Chromium and we’re not contemplating this possibility at this time. We are only making those strings either common or specific to Chromium available for translation.

How often will translations be updated?
?It depends on the Chromium version and the operating system you are using:

• Ubuntu, stable: if you are using the Chromium version provided in the Ubuntu package through Software Center, you will get a translations update whenever there is a new Chromium stable version released upstream.
• Ubuntu, PPA: If you are using the Chromium daily PPA for Ubuntu, there are several options depending on which actual PPA (channel) you are using: for trunk, once a string is translated in Launchpad it takes about 2 days to be available; for the other channels (dev, beta, stable) translations are only made available whenever there is a Chromium upstream release.
• Other: the frequency of updates in other distributions will depend on the use they make of the translations and their update policies. There are currently no Chromium builds for Windows or Mac.

This is a fully automatic process: translations exported from Launchpad are fetched daily, merged with the upstream trunk and changes are landed in the corresponding PPA of the daily builds.

How can other Operating Systems use the Chromium community translations?
The intention is that any Operating System/Linux distribution can benefit from the work from Launchpad translators, so these translations will be available to anyone interested in using them. They  can even be used for Windows and Mac.

If you are interested in using the translations for another distro, the best thing is to get in touch with Fabien (you’ll also find him as fta in the #chromium IRC channel on Freenode).

If you’ve got more questions, also feel free to ask by sending a comment to this blog post.

Happy translating!

?

So, as our fearless leader nicely put it, it’s Ubuntu Follow Friday!

This last couple of days in the Community team we’ve been looking at some of the ways to spread out the word about different areas of contribution in Ubuntu, share our excitement and reach out to a bigger audience.

We’ve been reviewing and reviving some resources we already had and we’ve been creating new ones, and in the case of translations I just thought I’d give a heads up to everyone about them.

Translations

Facebook

Check out our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/ubuntu.translators and make sure to ‘Like‘ us to keep in touch! In less than two days we’ve already got more than 600 fans, so now it’s your chance to also show your support for the awesome work of Ubuntu Translators and to stay in touch with translations news.

Feel free to upload your pictures and videos related to translations, such as translation jam photos, and comment on our wall as well!

Microblogging

Twitter – If you use Twitter, you can subscribe to the ubuntul10n group to share thoughts and announcements in real time about everything related to translating Ubuntu. You can use @ubuntul10n, to send notices to the group, or the #ul10n hashtag for your related tweets.

Identi.ca – If you use identi.ca, you can subscribe to ubuntul10n to follow thoughts and announcements in real time about everything related to translating Ubuntu. In addition to @ubuntul10n, you can also use the !ubuntutranslators, !ubuntu-l10n, !ul10n or !utranslators tags to send notices to the ubuntul10n group, and the #ul10n hashtag for your related tweets.

Remember that these now exist in addition to the existing outreach resources. As before, the main channel for discussion and announcements remains the ubuntu-translators mailing list, but we also want to reach out to everyone who prefers other communication methods. All important announcements will be posted in all of these channels.

I’ve also updated our Ubuntu Translations contact page with all this information.

Other interesting areas

Well, translations are not the only cool area about translations. Check these out as well:

• Ubuntu Development Facebook Page
• Ubuntu Developers on Twitter and Identi.ca
• Ubuntu Cloud Facebook Page
• Ubuntu Cloud on Twitter and Identi.ca

All in all, great ways to stay up to date with key areas of our diverse and vibrant community. I’m sure I’ve left out many others, do add them in the comments!

??We’ve uploaded  language packs in the maverick-proposed repository for everyone to test before they are released to all users. These should contain all the updates and fixes in translations done since the Maverick release date.

I’d like to ask translation teams and other community members to test them and provide an indication that they’ve done so by following some simple steps and submitting a sign-off, so that we know that translations have been successfully tested.

Simply follow the instructions in this page and add your sign-off in the table at the bottom:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/LanguagePackUpdatesQA

The deadline for the testing is the 17th of December (in a weeks’ time). After that, we’ll update the language packs we’ve received feedback for into maverick-updates, so that all users can benefit from the new translations and fixes.

Remember that you’ll have to enable the maverick-proposed repository to get these updates.

Some Notes

Language Pack Update Schedule

Kenneth Nielsen from the Ubuntu Danish translation team has been rocking in getting the language packs schedule project into shape this cycle. Give him a hug if you see him around!

We’ve now got a plan for the Maverick schedule, including a wiki calendar, a google calendar and an iCal feed:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/MaverickLanguagePackReleaseSchedule

You can now subscribe to the calendar with your calendar client (e.g. with Evolution) or web e-mail account, so that you can stay up to date on the next scheduled updates and coordinate translations accordingly.

You’ll find the links on the wiki calendar page.

Bugs

If there are open bugs for the translations in your language, it would be great if you could you check that they are fixed and mark them as “Fix Released”.

You can see if there are bugs for your language by going to the following URL:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-l10n-<yourlanguagecode>

As an example, the German team’s URL would be:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-l10n-de

Help us getting the language pack tested and get all those fixes and new translations to everyone!