Comment 11 for bug 512395

Here's some background first:

OpenOffice.org was translatable in Launchpad until a few cycles back. Translations done in Launchpad had to be exported in a tarball by clicking on the export button and then put in the package and build it with them. After some cycles where translations were never exported and put in the package due to lack of resources, we decided to disable translation of OO.o in Launchpad so that we wouldn't waste the translators effort.

So here's why there are no translatable templates for OO.o or LO (for LO we haven't even discussed translations, nor have we checked whether the package generates pot files that can be imported into LP)

And here's the proposal:

While we decide on what the best strategy for LO translations is, one thing we could do is at least make the .desktop files translatable in Launchpad. Right now they are up for translation in the wiki, which, while it works, it's a pain for both packagers and translators to maintain, and it does not allow for translations to be updated in language packs. So here's an idea:

* Add 'X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=lo-desktop' to the LO .desktop files in the sources
* Modify the package to build a POT file containing the translatable messages from the .desktop files. I'd suggest having a rule in debian/rules to use intltool to build that POT file. It should match the domain name in X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain, so it would be called lo-desktop.pot
* Once the package would build, lo-desktop would be exposed for translation in Launchpad and would be marked for export in Language packs.
* Once the next language pack would ship, translations for the desktop files would be loaded from there.

I think we should have a session on LO translations at UDS-O as well.