– Launchpad can be effectively used for upstream projects; many of them already are using it, and those translations are not necessarily in any relationship with Ubuntu translations (that part of process is up to Ubuntu to decide, Launchpad is just a tool)

– Launchpad has a good quality control in place: all translations go through suggest/review process (they are first suggested, then reviewed), if project owners want it that way (privileges can be set up in a more fine-grained way as well)

– Launchpad currently lacks syncing with any source code branches, and we are planning on working on this soon; I understand how this can be a major problem for any upstream project, but getting tarballs and uploading POTs shouldn’t be such a big deal (with many of them though, it can, so we have some scripts to help you with that)

– We do manual first-time approval of POTs so far, because they are commonly bad or wrong; after the first-time approval, they are recognized by the system in the future and no manual intervention is required if you follow a few simple policies (like using the same filename and paths if you have more than one); if you’ve run into problems with this, please email me at danilo@canonical.com and we can resolve it ASAP

Also, I’d like to mention that in the near future (next few months), we will support doing translations of several releases at the same time. This will enable translators to do the work more easily by doing it only once for messages that are common between eg. 0.3.* and 0.4.* (or whatever you keep doing releases of). They’d still be able to diverge, but I doubt many will want to.

Anyway, according to voting results so far (9:1 for local installation of Transifex over Launchpad), it seems your interests have swayed one way already, but if you need further help in the future, or need more stuff clarified (eg. about how to best set LXDE up in Launchpad), feel free to contact me at danilo@canonical.com.

Cheers,
Danilo