[Localization] Upstream i18n issues that could impact our users.

[Chris Leonard]

Dear Sugar and OLPC Developers and Localizers.

I want to raise awareness of the fact that a few important packages
that we use (GIMP and WebKitGTK+) are having serious issues with poor
i18n apparently caused by intltool bugs.  As a downstream, these can
impact our user's experience.

GIMP i18n failure:

This bug details the probable cause (ignoring .scm files?) for GIMP
script-fu only having 61 strings instead of 600-odd as it should.

GIMP missing menu translations
https://bugs.launchpad.net/intltool/+bug/986897

They are using a manual workaround on Launchpad for Ubuntu (comment #8).

There is a also comment that this change may have introduced the issue:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~intltool/intltool/trunk/revision/722


WebKitGTK+ i18n failure:

I came across the GIMP issue while searching for an answer to why
WebKitGTK+ POT generation is munged up.  If someone has a problem
while using Browse, I suspect our users may end up seeing these
unlocalized strings from WebKitGTK+.

See errors here:
http://l10n.gnome.org/module/webkit/

It apparently can most easily be fixed by addressing the intltool ticket below.

There's no way to specify where's the po directory if it's not on topdir
https://bugs.launchpad.net/intltool/+bug/823217

We are not going to get good L10n bits from upstream for GIMP or
WebKitGTK+ until these two bugs are addressed.  If you use Launchpad,
please feel free to click the "this bug affects me" link on these
bugs.  I'm hoping for some action on these upstream i18n issues as
they impact our users and more visibility (politely raising a ruckus)
can only help.


Regards,

cjl
Sugar Translation Team Coordinator