Re: Serbian (sr) language translation team: maintainer unresponsive

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Danilo Segan wrote:
> There are a few problems with the Serbian translation process for GNOME
> 2 desktop & development environment.
[...]
> But, just a suggestion: I believe that now removed ISO code of "sh"
> (formerly Serbo-Croatian, now to distinct languages of "sr" and "hr")
> should be more appropriate for latin transcription, and there's a far
> better chance of it never getting assigned by ISO, because it was
> already in use.
>
> So, the suggested resolution should be: "sr" for Serbian language (which
> means also cyrillic alphabet), and "sh" for latin transcription.

Whatever suits you better. The important thing is not to use non-standard
language codes. In a sense that might apply to "sh" as you wouldn't use it
for its intended purpose as I understood it. But I admit I know very
little about the details involved here with legacy from previous
(broken) usage of codes.


> Next, far greater problem is the bad communication and coordination
> current maintainer of Serbian translation provides. He has had taken
> over the duty already for a greater part of the year, but the results
> are hardly encouraging. I have repeatedly asked for some instructions on
> conducting translation, but have neve received anything but words that
> "preparations are in progress". Several others have had simiral experiences.
>
> A month or so ago, the maintainer Tomislav Jovanović has started a web
> page at Savannah, and a corresponding mailing list. Seems encouraging,
> except that the only three messages sent to the list were by those
> asking how to contribute, without adequate answer. For the sake of
> "political correctness", I am also cc-ing this message to this list, and
> please keep it that way, so Tomislav might answer if he finds it
> appropriate.

I haven't recieved responses from the Serbian coordinator either for
several months.

I've been meaning to send a list of unreachable team coordinators for
some time now, but haven't gotten to that point yet. Unreachable team
coordinators are very bad for the project, as both new volunteering
translators and existing translators with finished translations are
largely directed into a vacuum without response, and hence translation
work for such languages in most cases effectively stalls. Being a
team coordinator is a privilege, not a right, and part of the response of
being a coordinator is to assign the coordinator duty to someone else once
one doesn't have enough time to do the coordination work. Unfortunately,
in some cases people forget that and go on with other interests or
duties in life without appointing someone else as team coordinator.

I'd like to formally give the current Serbian translator a weeks time to
respond to this. If there is a lack of response from the current
maintainer in that week, we should appoint someone else as new team
coordinator.

Danilo, if you are volunteering for the position as new Serbian team
coordinator, please send a mail with the details needed from
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/teams.html#starting to the list
as soon as possible.


Thanks,
Christian