Outline of required work

[Brain-dump from cjwatson, 2016-05-22.]

Launchpad uses the Zope framework, which supports internationalisation, and it is in theory possible to run "bin/i18nextract" in a built Launchpad source tree to build a launchpad.pot file. However, that currently fails to parse (at least) some templates in Launchpad that include xmlns:rdf namespaces. A required first step is therefore to figure out why that is and how to fix it.

After that, it will be a long slog to make the resulting launchpad.pot (which will be very large) be a reasonable set of translatable strings, which will probably involve tracking down all sorts of places where strings are currently built up from sentence fragments in ways that won't be translation-friendly. I'm sure that a lot of this will be handled automatically, but initially it will involve a great deal of manual review, bearing in mind that the end result will have to be entirely automated.

Next, it will be necessary to point Zope at the right set of .po files at run-time; to test that doing so actually works; and to hook up some arrangements to automatically build a .pot file, ship it over to Launchpad Translations, and ship .po files back. We obviously wouldn't want to ask translators to translate a very large volume of text that we don't actually end up using.

All that would make Launchpad minimally translatable in theory, but there would still be a long tail of problems involving text that's emitted directly from Python code and not currently marked as translatable. Some of this will probably be quite complicated to fix.

This is probably months of work. We'd be happy to mentor somebody who wants to pick pieces off this outline.

Dmitry Agafonov <dmitry {_AT_} agafonov.pp.ru>

1, 2 and 3 - Localized web ui.

Is LP translatable at all?

SkyMan <skymanphp {_AT_} gmail.com>

1. Multilingual Lauchpad UI (Translations at the first)

Jan-Marek Glogowski <glogow {_AT_} fbihome.de>

1. i18n of the UI

Legendario <kemel.zaidan {_AT_} ubuntu-sp.org>

 4. Do I have the time for a fourth one? Because I think these is my major
    wishe: I would really, really like a way to translate Launchpad itself,
    because for LoCo teams, there are some tasks that are still difficult for
    newcomers such as the signing of the CoC and some other things. Translation
    teams could be in charge of that and use Rosetta for the task. People who
    doesn't speak English can also support Ubuntu on other fields such as LoCo
    teams.

Nasir Khan Saikat <nasir8891 {_AT_} gmail.com>

1. a option to use launchpad in users native language.