Hi David,
I am not really affected by the problem Ralf has described (at least I am not aware that I am affected ;) ), but as I am also a "german academic plugin developer", I'd like to add my 2 cents:
We have contributed several plugins to the Moodle plugins repo and have decided to follow the best practice to only ship the english language pack with the plugin and to translate the german language - our native language - in AMOS.
This has the positive effect that everyone in the community is able to improve the german translation and that the german language pack maintainers can have an eye on several fixed terms (like the consistent naming of "student" or "teacher" in german Moodle).
However, this strategy becomes negative as soon as other german community members try to "improve" translations of our plugins but get it wrong. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where someone else changes some important term of the german translation of one of our plugins in AMOS and gets the change through the language pack maintainer's review. As soon as this change will get downloaded (nowadays automatically) to our Moodle, this change might produce problems for our users and might raise our support effort. In the end, we might need to change the string back in AMOS which is even worse for the whole community.
So, it would be great if
a) we as plugin developers would be able to review string changes of one or some (previously defined) languages of our own plugins instead of relying on the work of the central language pack maintainers.
b) or we as plugin developers would at least be pinged about changes of one or some (previously defined) languages of our plugins which were just accepted by the central language pack maintainers.
Furthermore, with such a mechanism, we could lower the workload of the central language pack maintainers because mostly they are only pushing through the translations for our own plugins which have been thoroughly worked out before by us.
PS: This corresponds somehow with the outstanding ticket https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDLSITE-2957 which might also improve the traceability of the language pack maintainer's changes to a AMOS contribution.
Thanks for your work,
Alex