For this episode I spoke with Daniel Sanz. He's a support engineer in the spanish office and is responsible to oversee the translation efforts on Liferay.

• He's the one to keep the pootle instance at translate.liferay.com populated and synchronize changes between pootle and the git repository. This started with some script by Milan Jaros
• Liferay has some generated translations (with the help of babelfish or bing translate) as well as some copied (english) texts in all the localizations. This needs to be handled, so that pootle does know which (existing) translation still requires manual work.
• the process of synchronization between pootle and git requires some patches and bugfixes in pootle - an open source, python based product.
• More complication added by maintaining different branches of Liferay, different plugins (not only portal) and different sources of translations (git, pootle, Jenkins, other contributions).
• it's hard to keep 100% completion for a translation as new features are constantly added
• Due to the scripting work, translation can be done either in git or in pootle.
• Liferay provides translations to roughly 42 (sic!) languages.
• Shoutout to Daniel Reuther, who has worked hard on the german translation, standing in for me because my vacation came just at the right time - thanks Daniel.
• History of translations and automatic translations (starting with Yahoo's babelfish, continuing with Bing translator) and if they make sense... (hint: no, with an exception mentioned at the end)
• \o/ : The pootle import scripts ignore automatic translations. They only appear on the UI when they continue to not be translated.
• We're evaluating to use other tools than pootle - however, the existing bidirectional scripting makes it hard to choose something different (even updating pootle can be hard)
• Become part of the Translation Team and communicate on the Translation Forum