Confused about "upstream" in translations

"Upstream" is what the upstream decides it is. Since you are the maintainer, you can decide that.

For Launchpad, "upstream" is whatever is in your Launchpad project translations (as opposed to what might be in Ubuntu package translations). As such, when you import translations and let people modify them directly in LP, they are all "upstream". You can't have LP treat lp:rkward translations as "parent" translations for translations done in LP project. Internally, I believe we do store the information what was contributed by Launchpad users and what is coming from your source code, but we don't show that anywhere yet. The distinction is there mostly for Ubuntu (i.e. Ubuntu translations can differ from the upstream translations).

Launchpad is designed to allow projects to be translated in Launchpad, thereby making Launchpad the "upstream" (the main source of translations). OTOH, you can also set up an import of translations from upstream source code repository (wherever that may be), but if you generally get translations committed directly (i.e. outside LP), then it's usually a bad idea to have it translatable in LP as well.

Reasons are that there may be duplication of work (i.e. when someone translates in LP, that's directly visible; if someone downloads a PO file and wants to commit it after they are done to the upstream SCM, somebody else will not know that and may start translating in LP, thus wasting their time), and inconsistency troubles (i.e. a translator working directly upstream might have different opinions on how stuff should be translated than the translator working in Launchpad; Launchpad has a relatively fine-grained permissions system, but problems may arise because Launchpad can't control what gets into the SCM directly; this may annoy either upstream or LP translator, or both).

Launchpad itself won't stop you from doing both, because there may be legitimate reasons. However, my suggestion would be to make Launchpad the central translation point, and only import the POT file (translation template) from your upstream branch.

(Btw, Ubuntu package is not translatable in LP because it's part of Universe; that's the Ubuntu policy which they are looking to change: i.e. at the moment, they directly include upstream translations coming from source tarballs)

Hi!

Thanks for your insightful answer. Let me add some comments:

1) I do see your points about coordination issues when translations are available at several places. And I do intend to encourage my existing translators to use Launchpad, exclusively (though for now, I have just started evaluating this solution). However, the problem is absolutely *not* specific to my setup, but pretty much inherent. Keep in mind that
  a. Translations need to be distributed with the sources, eventually. So, naturally, there will always be several places, where you obtain .po's, potentially in different versions, even if there is only one place where you can submit them.
  b. Translators may have good reason to work on their translation offline, at least some of the time.
Yes, the problem gets a lot worse, if you add synchronization delays. But it is absolutely inherent, if several people work on the same translation.

2) I think you'd have a hard time to convince "up-upstream" projects to keep their translations on translations.launchpad.net, exclusively, rather than at least *storing* them in their version control system. But this quite simply means, projects will want to synchronize their translations, at least in one direction. For that, giving some better indication of what differs with respect to the "up-upstream" repository would seem very helpful to me.

Anyway, I have submitted two wishlist items with respect to this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/787533
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/787535

Regards
Thomas

Thanks Данило Шеган, that solved my question.