Disaster: many translations suddenly damaged by distorted accents

[Pjotr]

On the Translation mailing list there are many reports of suddenly damaged translations on the Pootle server. Characters with accents, like ë, ó, à, etc., Chinese characters, etc. etc. have become completely garbled all at once. Right after a sudden outage of the Pootle server.

Many translators have reported this, about the German, Dutch, French, Croatian and simplified Chinese translations. And there will undoubtedly be more languages that are affected. By the way: I'm a Dutch translator myself.

This is very bad. Reparation by the translators, would be very time-consuming. For some languages it would even mean starting all over again, with everything.....

Can this disaster somehow be repaired by the maintainer of the Pootle server?

[Pjotr]

I *really* would like a response from the Pootle server maintainer. Is recovery possible, or is the damage irreparable?

Affected languages so far:

- German:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000351.html

- French:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000352.html

- Dutch:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000353.html

Simplified Chinese:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000355.html

- Croatian:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000356.html

- Chinese (Taiwan) and Japanese:
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/translations/2011-November/000358.html

For some languages, this means complete and utter ruin for the translations. They have become absolutely 100 % useless. All the work of the translators in vain. Down the drain.

[windtalker]

I'm not a server rep and have no idea how to contact one but every server I've ever used makes a backup copy of every account periodically for just such an occasion. I always kept an up to date backup of my own work for such an occasion as well.

[kmoore134]

It looks like the backend hasn't been affected, so nothing should have
been changed. Checking into this now to try and figure out why pootle is
doing this.