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

["RKVS Raman" <rkvsraman gmail com>]

Hello,

Not all in CDAC  are aware of the ways open source communities work.
So some need to be treated with some amount of patience and gumption.

Nevertheless we can make a fresh start now and let me get some guys
from BOSS team on this along with making the translations available
again :-) (I guess they took it offline cos of this thread).

This thread needed a logical ending and so is marked to Gnome list as well.


Best Regards
-Raman


On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:49:09 +0530
> "RKVS Raman"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
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