Gnome Internationalization: A proposal

[Edward Mbugua Kamau <emkamau afrocenter com>]

Hi

This may be completely offbase but it may not. As a non technical Gnome
User I have been looking for ways to contribute and I hit on translating
Gnome. However, there appears to be no team for my language (Kiswahili)
and I don't know anybody else who both speaks the language and uses
Gnome. However, there are plenty of people who speak the language but
use an inferior OS, which will remain nameless. I thought that perhaps
those people could be involved in translating Gnome. Here is my
proposal.


Proposal
The Gnome community set up a database of all the translatable strings in
all the pot(?) files.That database should then be made web accessible,
so that language speakers can view the text to be translated, over the
internet and enter their translations directly on the website.These
translations would then be vetted by the specific language team and they
would decide what makes it into the pot files.If no team exists then the
transaltions would be left online and eventually would form a basis for
translation when a team appears.


Benefits
I see a number of benefits to this.

1. Teams could be much smaller since they would have the assistance of a
large base of language speakers. This would especially benefit those
languages which are sparsely represented in the Gnome user base.

2. The website would form a meeting point for speakers of a language,
who may then go on to form translation teams or join existing teams.

3. People take ownership of whatever they participate in and contribute
to. People who might never use Gnome may begin to use it simply because
they have been helping out with translations on the website. 

4. It will increase the opportunity for Gnome users to give back to the
community. People who may not be willing to make the commitment to work
on a translation team, may be quite willing to do some translations
whenever the mood takes them.

5. It may result in better quality translation (more eyes, more heads
(mouths?) etc).


Apologies if this is totally impractical from a technical standpoint.I
am not a programmer, but it seems doable to me. I would just like to put
this out there for more competent folks to look at.


Thanks,


Edward M. Kamau
More Power to Gnome

PGP signature