Re: Gnome Internationalization: A proposal

[Edward Mbugua Kamau <emkamau afrocenter com>]

Yes, it may be best for those languages where there is currently a very
low level of translations. I do envisage a language team or a couple of
people making sure that the translations that are accepted are
consistent. This probably would not work for docs though.

I have been thinking of a setup where the strings to be translated are
displayed in a form on a web page along with all other translations that
have been made by others (if any) along with instructions and examples.
The translator then makes their translation and this posts to the
database. The language team can then pick the best translation as the
official one. Perhaps there could even be a database of how certain
terms have been acceptably translated before - a sort of lexicon.

If some one with programming skills were interested in this perhaps they
could point the way to how to do it. I did a sort of test run using cat
and grep (Hey, thats the extent of my programming skills) to see if I
could get the strings into a file and then into MySQL. this did not work
well at all. I'm will to learn a scripting language though (Perl, PHP)
to help with my own website as well as this.

Any thought you have would be greatly appreciated.

Edward Kamau 


On Mon, 2002-03-18 at 15:20, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> I think it may be a good idea, and I am willing to look into how to do
> it. I have some thoughts about how to do it.
> 
> However this is probably only interesting for some languages, the ones
> where you miss a lot of translations. What is needed for some other
> languages is a lot better quality assurance, that terms are used
> consistantly, thet texts are translated correctly, that the language is
> not too technical (english-like) that the shortcuts are not duplicated
> (&a meand two things etc). For languages in that situation random
> translators would actually probably worsen the situation.
> 
> Anyway I think it is useful for languages like yours, and other
> languages that I am a little involved in.
> 
> I will return to this subject when I have a little more concrete.
> 
> keld
> 
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 02:46:25PM -0600, Edward Mbugua Kamau wrote:
> > 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
> >  
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
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