Re: Non-community-based approaches to localisation

["Simos Xenitellis" <simos lists googlemail com>]

2008/9/7 Sri Ramadoss M <shriramadhas gmail com>:
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net> wrote:
>>
>> 1. I know of no attempt to contact existing language
>>   teams prior to starting on this work. This is true
>>   at least of Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Oriya.
>>   Worse yet, the language team line in the .po file
>>   header has been changed to some CDAC address, which
>>   can only lead to myriad problems down the road.
>
> Its the case with Tamil too.
>
>
>>
>> Would like to hear your views.
>>
>
> I am not sure why so much of effort is put unnecessarily, when doors of the
> community are always open even to them.

The part that I think that is surprising is that a big organisation
(in this case C-DAC), took the initiative to put resources to carry
out large-scale open-source localisation.
I am not sure if I speak alone here, I would be delighted if I saw a
similar attempt for my mother tongue. Even a limited, crude attempt,
or a just sign of interest would be great for my case.

The fact that the open-source l10n communities in India were not
consulted before the C-DAC localisation work, looks to me as a common
mistake, and does not surprise me. The way that open-source
communities work is just too different, and you can expect such
issues.

What I see that was missing and still is, is a person to act as
liaison between the open-source localisation communities of India and
C-DAC. I took up somewhat this role during the discussion some months
ago, but it just looks awkward for me to be further involved.
Could someone pick up this task?

What you have in hand is that there is a big organisation which showed
interest some months ago with l10n, and it might still have interest
in open-source localisation. It's up to you to lead the way with
C-DAC, in localisation or other open-source activities.

Simos