Re: open translations database

[Kenneth Christiansen <kenneth gnu org>]

I am looking very much forward to this aswell ;) The more we can do to
ease the translations with tools (I am activily developing these myself), 
QA-testing, etc. the better for the whole open source community.

One of the things that this community really need is an better translation
process. The problem is often not the quality with the translations, but
that the translator cannot keep up with all the new strings, cannot figure
out the meaning, cannot figure out weather to change a keybinding or not 
(which ones are already used?). Also, the Gnome apps are often not tested
carefully if they are totally translatable, comments are missing in the 
pot files, applications are being released without the translators ever
knew that a release was pending.

I am sure that Sun can be a great help in this respect...maybe we cannot
solve all, but we can atleast do a try. I recomment that we gather some of
the most active translators, i18n developers, etc. and then in a small
group discuss how to do all this together with the new Sun people. Also
this way we can define the way to do this, so people do not feel that Sun
is going to take over their domain (I know Sun will not do this, but you
can easily misinteprediate it, if someone QA-person at Sun suddently
starts to say that it's called "laptop" and not "bærbar" in Danish.)

I say this, since I know that a lot of the people who are translating are
doing it also for their own language. This is a good thing I think! We do
not want to scare these people away, just because of small things like
this. These people (myself included) believe that it's still possible to
learn people new words...so for instance if most computer nerds in Denmark
are saying "Device", this does not mean that it is the word we will settle
on. If the original translation team decide that "Enhed" is better, then
"Enhed" it is. - This is very importain if Sun is offering QA-help, that
we get a good descussion started first (in the language team, with the sun
person for that language), and that the QA-person will look at the
translators as equal people.

Well I am not trying to say that this would ever happen ;) I just want to
point out, that we need to make sure that is does not, orelse the free
software translation project has failed.

Cheers, and hopes for a good cooperation,

Kenneth Christiansen,

GNOME, GNU, Red Hat translator
and i18n tool developer
 



On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Christian Rose wrote:

> Hello Aoife,
> 
> I believe most teams are interested in working together with people from
> Sun and it's contractors with improving the GNOME translations.
> Of course, I can only speak for the Swedish team, but we look very much
> forward to hear from Sun and the Swedish freelancer working for Sun (is
> there one?), possibly with a QA on existing GNOME translations.
> 
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
> 
> > Aoife Dunne - Sunsoft ELC wrote:
> > Gustavo, I can have our Brazilian Portuguese freelancer
> > perform a QA on GNOME translations and report his/her
> > feedback to the Brazilian Translation Team.  Let me know if
> > you are interested.
> > 
> > Bye for now
> > Aoife
> 
> 
> 
> #######################################################################
> Christian Rose
> http://www.menthos.com                    	    menthos@menthos.com
> #######################################################################
> 
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