Gnash release planned - urgent need for L10n help

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

Dear Gnome localizers.

Rob Savoye is planning a new release of Gnash in mid-January.

Gnash is the GNU SWF movie player, which can be run standalone on the
desktop or an embedded device, as well as as a plugin for several
browsers.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://www.gnashdev.org/

Many strings have recently been added to the Gnash project and so I am
making an urgent request for assistance to the Gnome localizers for
help with this important sister GNU project effort.  The goal is to
achieve a reasonable level of L10n coverage, both in number of
languages and in the percent completion of each language.

Gnash has historically used a "download the POT, complete it and post
it to the mailing list" L10n workflow.  As you might expect, this
results in relatively poor L10n coverage.  At present, the Gnash
repository /po directory has the following submissions (only 9
languages, none of them complete).

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnash.git/tree/po

Czech		79%
Danish		83%
English (UK)	83%
Finnish		 7%
French		17%
German		 7%
Italian		 3%
Japanese	 3%
Spanish		83%


This is a sad state of affairs for an important free software project
used around the world.  The Sugar Labs / OLPC / eToys localization
community has been collaborating with the Gnash community by offering
hosting for the Gnash PO files on our Pootle server and contributing
to Gnash localization in appreciation of their work to provide a free
/ libre alternative to proprietary SWF / Flash players.

gnash.po files hosted here:
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/upstream_POT/

The Gnash PO file is currently available for translation into these 90
languages.  The Gnash PO file can be made available on Pootle in other
languages upon request.

Acholi, Afrikaans, Akan (Twi:Asante), Albanian, Amharic, Arabic,
Armenian, Asturian, Aymara (Aru), Bamanankan, Basque, Belarusian,
Belarusian-latin, Bengali, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chiga, Chinese
(China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, English (United Kingdom), Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish,
French, Fulah, Galician, Ganda, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi,
Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer,
Korean, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Macedonian, Malagasy,
Malay, Mandinka, Marathi, Nahuatl languages, Nepali, Northern Sotho,
Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese,
Portuguese (Brazil), Quechua (Ayacucho-Chanka), Quechua
(Cusco-Collao), Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Serbian-latin,
Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Songhai languages, Spanish, Swahili,
Swedish, Swiss German, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Tzotzil, Ukrainian, Urdu,
Vietnamese, Welsh, Wolof, Yiddish, Zulu

 If you truly care about making free / libre software available in
your native language, please consider contributing some time and
effort to working on the Gnash L10n over the next few weeks.  You have
an opportunity to have a huge impact on the user experience of free
software users and creating a viable alternative to using a
proprietary SWF player.

You should be able to download the gnash.po file for your language and
work with it off-line in your favorite PO editor or you can register
on our Pootle server and localize it on-line.  If you choose to work
off-line, please send your PO files to me and I will make sure that
they get uploaded to our Pootle server.  I will work with Rob Savoye
(Gnash developer and release manager) to make sure that your
contributions are included in the upcoming release.

As the PO file for Gnash is quite large, off-line work may be fastest.
 I will try to see if it is possible to create something like a
"reduced PO" file for Gnash that focuses on the most prominent UI
strings, but in the meantime, there are many strings that need to be
localized and this is a wonderful chance to make a big difference with
your localization skills to start off the New Year (Gregorian).

Please spread this message to any distro L10n communities that package
Gnash.  It would be awesome if we could turn the first few weeks of
this New Year into a globally distributed translation marathon on
behalf of Gnash.

Thank you for your attention to this request.  Time is of the essence
to meet the new release date goal.

Warmest Regards and a Happy and Healthy New Year to All.


cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator