As always, using Debian Bug Tracking System to deal with translation work and particularly to send translation updates or new translations, is the recommended way.
Translators are encourage to send new translations or translation updates as bug reports against the relevant package. The use of the reportbug utility is encouraged for translators working on Debian systems or Debian derivative systems (such as Debian-Edu or Ubuntu). The reportbug is part of the reportbug package which can be installed with the following command line:
This should be done as root or, if the current user is listed in sudoers by using the sudo command (this is useful on Ubuntu systems where the root user is not activated by default):
Bug should be reported against the source package which the translation belongs to, preferably.
reportbug will prompt for a bug title. By general agreement, semi-formalised bug titles should be sued:
where <code> is the language ISO-639 code, <language> is the language name in English and <type> is the type of translation (which can be "po-debdonf", "programs", "man pages", etc.)
reportbug will request for the bug severity to use. By general agreement in the project, the wishlist severity should be used.
reportbug will also prompt for bug tags which is a common way to categorise bug reports. The l10n and patch bug tags should be used.
reportbug then drops the user into a text editor to fill in the bug text. There is usually no need to be very verbose there as most informations are obvious.
Finally, the translation file should be attached to the bug report (reportbug is clever enough to warn users when a bug tagged patch is sent without any file attached. The attached translation file can be sent as is but several translators commonly compress these files with gzip to avoid maintainers mail user agent messing up with the file encoding.
A recent announcement by Denis Barbier (FIXME: URL) proposed to use bugs usertagging to categorise l10n bugs.
This proposal sets up user tags such as l-<code;> where <code;> is the language code, l- being a prefix for language while t- could be a prefix for territory (or country). The user to use is debian-i18n@lists.debian.org. This proposal is currently not completely finalised and could change in the future.
Maintainers should use the sent files as is. They should NOT change them and, for instance NOT re-encode them. It is recommended that maintainers check that the translation is sent by someone who is either the former translator or someone with his/her approval. When in doubt, advice should be requested in the debian-i18n mailing list.
When maintainers receive new translations or translation updates for an upstream program, they must send them to upstream and possibly setup a good working method with their upstream for this translation updates flow. The translations of software in Debian should idealistically not be different from upstream translations.
Translation updates are registered exceptions to freezes that occur at the end of the Debian release cycle, so maintainers should make use of that general freeze time to make sure they have complete translations and possibly request for updates to their translators.