Re: [Indlinux-group] Non-community-based approaches to localisation

[Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net>]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:49:09 +0530
"RKVS Raman" <rkvsraman gmail com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> My name is RKVS Raman and I represent the localisation team in CDAC as
> far as OpenOffice is concerned. By all probabilities I am the person,
> Gora refers to about his experience with CDAC guys.

Actually, no it isn't you. I thought that we had gone
through this before, and to my mind you are one of the
people from CDAC who actually does make an effort to work
with the community. I am sorry to have seemingly riled
you up.

>                                           This mail is
> intended to make the stand of the l10n group at CDAC clear to the
> community and offer some explanation to the scathing accusations that
> Gora and others have made on CDAC. At the end of this mail I do hope
> CDAC contribution will be more welcome in the community.

I am sorry, what "scathing accusations"? I was relating my
personal experience, and still stand by what I have said
many times: CDAC does some very valuable work, but I see
little effort to do this in a participatory fashion. One
clear example of this is what we have been discussing in
this thread: Localisation done for some 18 languages,
which were distributed with BossLinux, but not submitted
back upstream, and I have yet to hear from any existing
language team coordinator that they had been contacted by
BossLinux folk. Other people have also pointed out flaws
with the process that BossLinux has chosen for localisation.

[...]
> When working under deadlines, it was our observation that sometimes
> (not all) the response from l10n communities for certain languages was
> absent and for certain others sluggish. Oriya was one of them. I have
> mails written to me by Gora in which he said that they were low on
> resources at that time. During a meeting with him in FOSS.IN, he had
> said that he cannot work towards our deadlines.

I did say that we were low on resources, but specifically
volunteered to participate myself in the first, important
step, the standardisation of the glossary of terms. We also
agreed, not only amongst the two of us, but with other
people from CDAC, that we would be willing to review
translations at an intermediate stage. None of this happened.

[...]
> Here is an organisation which is willing to make crucial contributions
> to the community at its own defined speed.
[...]
> At the same time few of us in the organisation do make sure that we
> don't lock our efforts in our own backup servers. We share it. We have
> always done it with OpenOffice and are now trying to do so for GNOME.
> I am surprised at the resistance we get when we are trying to do this.

Um, I have pointed out the reasons for this in my original
mail. Your translations of GNOME, at least as far as Oriya
goes, did not follow the standard terminology used by the
existing language team, and also sometimes missed the intended
context in computer terms. This makes it difficult to suddenly
integrate a large chunk of translations. Things would have
gone much more smoothly if this integration could have happened
a bit at a time, on a longer timescale.

> Should a major chunk of contribution go unnoticed just because we did
> not satisfy the egos of those in 'power'? I would not want to believe
> so. It would have been easy for us to just integrate it with our
> distro and be done with our work. We would have satisfied our funding
> agency, but we dont believe in it. We don't want to work in isolation.
> But no, we are not apologizing to anybody either.

Since the impression at CDAC seems to be that it is
doing people a favour by making the translated .po
files available, I would like to point out that since
Indian-language interfaces are distributed as binaries
on the BossLinux CD, and since many of the .po files
are covered by the GPL, CDAC is *required* to make such
source .po files available upon request.

> I now volunteer to be that liaison between open source communities and
> CDAC if need be. I have personally shared cordial relationships with
> ppl in IndLinux and so i  with some of my colleagues from the distro
> l10n team can work towards making sure that the difference in
> methodologies do not hurt the larger goals.
[...]

Great to hear that, and please believe me, I meant no personal
criticism in my original message. Can we now agree to let
bygones be bygones and try to move forward? The .po files at
http://downloads.bosslinux.in/Translated_Po_files/
seem to have disappeared. Can we get them back? Is it possible
for you to devote some resources to submitting files upstream?
We should also probably drop the gnome-i18n list from any
follow-ups.

Regards,
Gora