Why Blog?: LOUCA23 - An Interesting, Combined LibreOffice and Ubuntu Conference

Another year, another cool conference! This time is LOUCA 2023, a combined conference for LibreOffice and Ubuntu. It was on Saturday and Sunday, October 7^th & 8^th, 2023 in Universitas Sebelas Maret, Surakarta. I presented a lightning talk on first day, titled "State of Ubuntu Indonesian Translation". My first time giving a lightning talk (only 10 minutes! usually I have longer session, but for this occassion, I tried if I can effectively use a shorter one), and EO has put someone with very helpful banners within audiences, saying "5 minutes left", "1 minute left", "time's up" (or so, didn't really remember what was written :D). Thank you! It helped me manage my timing.

For you who can not attend, or attended but did not clearly catch what I said there, I will explain again here:

1. for Ubuntu Jammy (22.04), if you check Ubuntu's translation platform, you will see numbers like this (beware, language listed here will depend on your site settings; since I am a member of Indonesian and Javanese teams, by default Ubuntu Launchpad display those two languages):

As you can see, there are 180k+ strings still not translated into Indonesian, from total around 317k strings. More than half!

2. For Ubuntu Mantic (23.10), it is even worse, around 208k+ untranslated, from total around 350k strings.

Why so low? Do they really represent the real condition when someone tried to use Indonesian while using Ubuntu?

The answer has several parts. First, Ubuntu has created a list of packages that can be translated via its translation platform. Not all packages installable from Ubuntu repo can be translated via Launchpad. If you check using aptitude, you will see around

80k installable packages
25k virtual packages
30k tasks

3. For Ubuntu Mantic, that list only contain 558 packages.

Many of those packages are considered low priority to be translated. Who need Indonesian translation of gcc, gdb, and gas for instance? Of course they are there. But how many? Most Indonesian translators have elected to help translation of other packages instead.

The second part is, that several big packages has their own translation flow & infrastructure. Ubuntu only get final result (code + translation) and did not provide further translation. One (maybe more?) exception is GNOME. GNOME has Damned Lies for translation, but then Ubuntu take code and translation from upstream, and then add some Ubuntu specific modification upon them, and use Launchpad to facilitate Ubuntu specific translations.

4. Translation flow of several projects

5. Some projects which use Ubuntu Launchpad for their translations:

So see it yourself, how complete Ubuntu Indonesian translation is. If you use GNOME, I think it will be almost 100% done.

Last but not least, if you want to help us keeping Ubuntu Indonesian translation better and better for next releases, join us via Ubuntu Launchpad. Start with giving suggestion to untranslated strings, those will be considered in your application acceptance into Indonesian translation team.

Try to contact these team admin if you feel your application was not processed soon enough.