2010 Q4 GNOME Quarterly Report

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hi all,

here comes my proposal for a GNOME Localization update for the upcoming
2010 Q4 GNOME Quarterly Report. Sorry for being a little bit late with it!

If you think something is not correct or missing, please feel free to share
your feedback and suggestions, or simply edit the text directly at:

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/QuarterlyReports/2010/Q4

Thanks!

Best,
Petr Kovar

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Localization

On October 16, Gil Forcada presented results of the GNOME I18N Survey which
was referred to in the previous report. A brief analysis of the results was
included. 

Discussion on the possibility and feasibility of translating schema files
within separated gettext domains or catalogs emerged from the survey
analysis debate, as well as the point of localizing certain types of
strings that are usually not user-visible. Especially the price of
splitting limited resources within smaller translation teams was compared
with the eventual need to make significant changes to the current GNOME
i18n infrastructure and also to various module build systems.

With regard to the Release Team's second proposal for moduleset
reorganization from October 7, which would allow various software projects
outside of the GNOME infrastructure to become officially endorsed GNOME
software, members of the GNOME Translation Project expressed strong
preference for working on l10n support within the GNOME official i18n and
SCM infrastructure.

In the debate which spread over the gnome-18n and desktop-devel-list
groups, GNOME translators were mainly concerned about translation quality,
string freeze periods and release schedules, about expecting developers or
maintainers to integrate translations manually to their respective
repositories in a suitable, timely manner, and generally about changing the
current module requirements by dropping them and/or making them optional for
official GNOME software and GNOME developers.

Several proposals were made to (require to) allow the DL infrastructure on
l10n.gnome.org auto-commit translations to code repositories not hosted on
git.gnome.org, to migrate from the DL application altogether and replace it
with Transifex, and generally to specify l10n requirements for official
modules more narrowly and precisely. No final resolution was made in this
regard.

Sysadmin work on DL auto-commit, providing translators a way to manage l10n
support without interacting with Git system directly, was resumed during
October and November. Furthermore, GTP members discussed options to
integrate automatic QA checking with l10n.gnome.org.

There were also changes in coordination of the Persian and Romanian team in
October and November, respectively.

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