Serbian [sr] story (was: Re: Exciting translator stories for release notes)

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Okay, for a start, here's the (not so) short story of Serbian  
translation team.


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With Serbian translation anything but progressing in early April 2003,  
some new folks (Danilo Segan and Goran Rakic) joined the translation  
team and took over the coordination.

The real work began a couple of weeks later, when a website was  
established (Prevod.org) that was supposed to support the translators,  
allow them easier communication and guidance. It was fitted with an  
online dictionary, job administration (who does what -- to avoid work
duplication), and manuals for performing the translation. Danilo did
most of the coordinating and web site programming, while Goran helped
with initial translations, developed an offline dictionary using Gtk+,
and designed the look of the site. The access was open to anybody who  
understood Serbian and at least a bit of english, and help was welcome  
in any other way (eg. contribution through dictionary).

This quickly attracted many new translators, and soon, it was a team of
fifteen who helped make Serbian one of the best supported languages in
four months (and there were more than 50 registered members who helped  
with dictionary, discussions, voting, etc). The Serbian language has  
gone from 700 total translated messages, to 50 thousand translated  
messages in that timespan. [note -- Gnumeric should be completed in a  
couple of days, so this is "looking into future" ;-]. Of course, a full  
translation of core Gnome desktop and developer platform is included.

There's also a latin version (a transcription from cyrillic) which,  
though, is not as polished as the cyrillic version.