Thanks Cris,
I totally approve this message Chris! Abiword is a
great wordprocessor to start with before attacking other big fish...
like Xxx-Office. With more than 5,000 clicks, Abiword is the most
popular download on our website at www.pulaagu.com.
And still getting positive feedback. Localizing Abiword allowed us to
build a first glossary that proved very useful with subsequent Firefox
localization. Just to share my own experience working with Abiword....
Regards
Ibrahima Sarr
Dear GNOME Localizers,
AbiWord is nearing a major 3.0 release (timeline not fixed in stone),
but there is a current string freeze on. Now that the big L10n push
towards the Gnome 3.6 release is over, please consider contributing to
AbiWord L10n. The Sugar Labs Pootle instance hosts L10n of AbiWord as
part of our efforts to some love to our upstreams. AbiWord is
packaged as the word processor on the Gnome boot of the OLPC XO
laptop.
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/AbiWord/\
particularly the 2.9 PO file which will be come 3.0 at the upcoming release.
Some reasons to to consider localizing AbiWord:
1) If your language does not yet have a localized word processing
package, AbiWord is a really decent package and the L10n workload is
very low compared to the alternatives (only about 5K words). Having a
native language content creation package has an outsized impact on the
user experience, AbiWord is a good way to get there with minimal
effort. LibreOffice is a fine office package, but it has a lot of
strings (92K words)
2) AbiWord runs on a variety of platforms (Linux, Windowes, MacOS)
making it widely available to end users of your language.
3) Even if your language does have a LibreOffice localization, AbiWord
has a much lighter footprint on older and smaller machines, one of the
main reasons it is used on XO laptops.
4) Completion of some of the Euroepan "languages of empire" (for
instance French) is critical as they serve as "bridging languages" for
minority and indigenous languages. It is easier to find French >
Wolof translators than English > Wolof translators. but completion of
the French strings is a prerequisite to enable it's use as a bridge.
5) AbiWord tends to be the default word processer on "Gnome purist"
distros. It is Gnome-ish. The GNOME goffice and AbiWird devs enjoy
warm relations with some holding "dual citizenship". We encourage
AbiWord localizers to contribute to goffice L10n (where it is not
already complete) by means of a dummy PO file on Pootle that provides
a link upstream and serves as a "tracking ticket" for upstream
completion.
6) The AbiWord devs are "good people". Several years ago, they
created a cut-down version of AbiWord for use in Sugar (called the
Write Activity) that is used by millions of kids on XO laptops.
IMHO, that sort of contribution should be honored by making their work
accessible in as many languages as possible.
Of course, the choice is yours. I apologize if this is perceived by
anyone as "poaching" L10n effort, but as I have said before, I don't
believe that it is possible to "steal" localizers from a community
under any circumstances. Localizers are free agents and in my
experience they are driven more by "language loyalty" than "package or
distro loyalty", and in any event, as I described, AbiWord has a
strong GNOME affinity, so it is not entirely unrelated.
Warmest Regards,
cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator
P.S. If your language is not represented in the AbiWord project on
Pootle, just ping me a note and I will work with you to make it
available.
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