Translation import taking longer than expected

And right you are! The reason for the delay appears to be that this is a manual upload. That means that the initial upload of the template needs to be manually approved. Future uploads with the exact same path and filename will then automatically go into the same template.

Nowadays we recommend setting up branch synchronization to have your templates (and optionally translations) imported automatically from your development branch. Less work to do for everyone, less to go wrong.

For now I just approved the template, so most of your translations will import automatically. The en_US one won't though, since en_US is assumed to be the original language. We don't support translating to it.

Thanks.

In this case the master messages are en_GB. It's not a big problem to have to handle the small number of messages which differ in en_US manually, though it does seem a bit arbitrary to mandate a particular dialect of English as the "correct" one.

Another language that won't work by the way is de_DE. The proper language code there is just de, without the country code.

OK - should the other .po files have imported though?

The .pot template has now imported, but all the .po files are still listed as "Needs review".

OK, the .po files have now all been imported, except de_CH for some reason.

That's because de_CH is one of those "you probably don't want to do this" languages, like all other country-specific language variants except en_GB, pt_BR, zh_CN, and zh_TW.

Not that we're against supporting more languages and more region-specific translations (and in fact it's kind of cool to have as many as possible!) but there are risks: spreading the translation effort too thin, arbitrary differences between variations of the same language, and even sometimes people setting up their own translations because they don't want to join the main language's translation effort for whatever reason.

Note for comparison how the Spanish translations manage to stay unified under "es" despite significant differences between countries, and despite enormous numbers of potential translators. Quality and completeness of translations generally take priority over geographical specialization.

If you're sure you want a de_CH translation, we can approve it manually and then future uploads of the same file will be imported automatically.

Well, in this case at least a user has already gone to the trouble of producing an almost complete de_CH translation (it was complete, but a few messages have been added or have changed since), and I'm not going to throw away that work. It would be nice if they could be updated via launchpad along with the other translations.

OK. I approved it. Future uploads of the same file will be imported automatically.