Comment 2 for bug 289036

At least some of the translations you care about are, I believe, of strings already translated in Debian. (Please read down to the end of this comment, though.)

debian-installer's translations need to be updated by hand, since they're used before language packs are installed. Updating them wholesale from Launchpad puts me in the position of having to decide which of Debian's translations or Launchpad's translations are better each time I merge updated packages from Debian (i.e. at the start of every release cycle, and often more frequently than that). I'm afraid I simply can't afford to take on this workload for more than 50 languages. I also can't just throw away one side of the merge because (a) the translation changes done in Debian often constitute important bug fixes in the installer (analogous to c-format bugs, except that Launchpad can't check the substitution format here), so I can't throw away the Debian changes; (b) there's obviously no point in me updating translations wholesale from Launchpad if I'm going to throw away the Launchpad changes on merge. I cannot and will not be put in the position where I end up having to act as a proxy for translation changes in Launchpad where the Launchpad translation team did not take care of forwarding their translations upstream. Thus, I settled a long time ago on the position that I would incorporate Launchpad translations for Ubuntu-specific strings, but only use Debian translations for strings that exist there.

Ever since Warty, I have consistently advised all translators who have asked me about this to contribute translations of installer strings that exist in Debian directly to Debian. I realise that this isn't the same as the usual Launchpad translations workflow where it is possible to have translations in Ubuntu first, but I don't see any other way to do it that doesn't impose a completely unacceptable amount of work and linguistic knowledge on the installer team. I believe that the debian-installer translators are generally receptive to and indeed enthusiastic for contributions; the coordinator certainly is, and supports my position on this, so let me know if you have any social problems there and I may be able to escalate them.

I would like this to be documented somewhere for translators, but I don't know where it should be documented. If you do, feel free to write it up and I can review it for accuracy.

None of this applies to those strings which are specific to Ubuntu: at the time of writing, these are a small number of strings in cdrom-detect, partman-auto, partman-crypto, partman-target, pkgsel, and user-setup, and all or almost all of the strings in oem-config and ubiquity. I'd like to get a list of these published automatically but haven't got round to figuring this out yet. It can probably be extracted somehow from patches.ubuntu.com. I updated all these strings from Launchpad a couple of weeks ago.

I also gather that you object to "d'Ubuntu" in the translation you specifically refer to, and believe that it should read "de l'Ubuntu". These strings are part of a category I refer to as "branding", where the string in Debian includes the text "Debian" itself, and clearly needs to have "Ubuntu" substituted. This turns out to be a vastly more complicated subject than you might hope; the text surrounding the distribution name often needs to change slightly (e.g. "a Debian mirror" vs. "an Ubuntu mirror", or the current change of "de Debian" to "d'Ubuntu" for Catalan). At the same time, I generally want to stick to the rest of the Debian text for those strings for all the reasons described above, so what I do is merge all changes from Debian and "rebrand" all the references to Debian according to a set of rules which I've gathered over the years and recorded at the end of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributionDefaultsAndBranding. I'm afraid I'm not interested in negotiating this workflow because I strongly believe that anything else would be worse (it would leave me in an untenable position when the strings change on both sides of the merge), but I am generally interested in language-specific improvements to the rebranding changes we need to make.

However, can you explain to me, or perhaps more relevantly to the Debian Catalan translation team, why the existing Catalan text in Debian is wrong? It currently reads "Menú principal de l'instal·lador de Debian". Changing "de Debian" to "de l'Ubuntu" seems like a grammatical change that would be hard for me to apply consistently across the whole distribution, and is at odds with what I was told by one of your compatriots some time ago (Jordi Mallach). Could we please get Debian and Ubuntu to be consistent here so that I can simply apply this change consistently everywhere? If this is actually a standard grammatical transformation needed for proper nouns that begin with a vowel or something like that, then of course that's a different matter and we can simply adjust DistributionDefaultsAndBranding to explain that.

I think it would be best if we continued this conversation by e-mail rather than in this bug report. As a whole, this is not a bug I am willing to fix, but I am willing to make specific manual adjustments for Jaunty (it is far too late for Intrepid; this would have had to have been done a week ago, and I am simply physically unable to get any changes of this nature through in time now) if we can agree on them. To that end, I'm going to copy the text of this comment to the e-mail thread on ubuntu-translators.