They created launchpad for the community and it’s aimed to be maintained by the community. We have to convice Canonical that’s it’s worth to invest in launchpad.
But now we use Discourse to communicate and GitHub to host our code so it might not be worth. I think the smartest move it’s to try to find better alternatives as everyone seems to have already done.
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Hello all. I’m finding out who else at Canonical we should bring in to a conversation about our translation tools, and I hope soon into the new year we can have a chat between Canonical and the translator community about what steps are feasible for improving our tools and processes - and then how to actually implement them. Thanks for your patience - we know translating is more frustrating than it should be, and we need to both make plans for improving it and put those plans into action.
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Most excellent idea. Thank You for your support.
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Hey guys, I’ve added another feature request about dark mode, if you have any more bugs about modernizing Launchpad feel free to to this thread.
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And another one:
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Hi,
Any updates about this?
Thanks.
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I got back in touch with members of the Launchpad team, and here’s a brief summary. They know the translation performance needs attention and to be improved, but there have been some obstacles - critical issues bumping it down the roadmap and the fact that most of the developers for Rosetta have left Canonical. But, they are also exploring some solutions that take both of these factors into account.
This might not have been the update everyone was hoping for, but making translations better is definitely on the team’s radar, and they know it’s a very important issue. Thanks all for your patience!
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Hey @madhens, thank you for the reply.
I don’t want to get into your decision making process but is customizing an open source solution such as Weblate/Pontoon is on the table or they prefer a self developed system?
Thanks again and sorry if this question is out of place.
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I wish it was my decision making process! But what I can do is advocate to my manager, @kewisch and let him know the issues the community faces with translations, and what some of the solutions you have recommended are.
This absolutely isn’t out of place, and I hope with a stronger community team in place, and help from Desktop and Launchpad teams, we can help make some temporary and then some long-term solutions happen.
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Hey folks, I agree it would be good to move onto something more modern, or dedicate some time to fixing the issues we have. I’m meeting with the Launchpad team this week to hear more about their capacity and plans and will bring this up as well.
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If you can prepare some short community oriented summary of this meeting it would be awesome, thanks @kewisch 
Hi folks,
quick update from our meeting. Generally, moving to a different translation platform isn’t off the table, and of all the launchpad features is likely the most feasible.
At the same time, doing so is a moderately difficult project, as there are a number of dependencies such as current langpack facilities, sync translations, and the differences in process between packages and projects. The team would also need to evaluate the different platforms.
Adding to that, the team is currently fairly small, so we won’t be able to get larger projects onto their roadmap immediately. Concretely, this means the team won’t be able to consider it for this cycle, pushing the project into next year at earliest. Performance on translations is unfortunately a larger project as well. Over time, Canonical is looking to grow the launchpad team, so we may get additional resources that would speed up the process starting later in the year.
What I can offer is to see if there is maybe some low hanging fruit that would help improve the experience. If we can get together a list of papercuts that make the translation experience frustrating then maybe there are a few the team can pick up in between.
All of that said, Launchpad does accept community contributions. If there is an issue that is bugging you a lot and you have python and webdev experience, you might want to check out https://launchpad.readthedocs.io/ and I can help make connections as well. I’m not meaning to say “patches welcome” as a way to shoot down the request, but in addition to the work happening on the launchpad team, there are ways you can get involved as well.
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Hi,
First of all, thank you so much for your efforts into getting this moving.
I understand this might take some time and resources which are limited at the moment.
In the mean time I will try to help identify the most critical points which would be helpful to get fixed.
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Spaces needs to be highlighted/indicated between characters as well.
And inside the translation box if possible. -
Translation memory improvements: in case there is no suggestions available, TM should show a string with around 80% matching (as modern TMs do). So if I change a symbol (let’s say “:”) I can still see the nearest translation.
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If I review a translation and my team mate forgot to put the final dot (for example) although his translation is perfect, if I add that dot, his contribution won’t show up in “Translated and reviewed by …”. We need a way to display this as translated by him/her and reviewed by me.
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I would like to have a way to add new members to the team with restricted permissions. So they can still feel part of the team but sorted by members, reviewers and coordinators.
Thank you for your time. This is all I can think of at the moment.
I’m very exited and looking forward to see some of this changes implemented.
I know a little bit of Python as well so I might try to come up with something but don’t expect much.
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Thanks @kewisch this is much appreciated.
I have several comments about this:
- Regarding Launchpad, in terms of technical debt, would it be easier to implement a solution such as Weblate (since it’s Python it can also be integrated and adjusted to the system) or invest in changes?
- There is a mode to enable hybrid working environment with Weblate as long as all the work is done on Weblate’s internal repo.
- There are some open issues mentioned in this thread, some are not, the fact that there’s no TM, no way to search and replace globally among all projects and some other small annoyances is keeping us pretty busy with minor progress.
There are minor visual tweaks such as dark mode etc. but this is extra and I truly believe there are much bigger issues to tackle before that.
Thank you so much for all the correspondence, I’ll do my best to improve our communication and will make sure to keep you guys both in the loop when I’m hitting a wall.
Hey guys, I reported another bug about allowing the user to set the desired TM matching threshold:
It will be a lot easier to get matches even if these are not completely identical.