Re: Persian translations

[Ramanan Selvaratnam <rama uklinux net>]

Hi,

I have no comment to the specific subject of this thread.
Still want to share an important point w.r.t successful Gnome l10n.

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 07:47, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh@sharif.edu> writes:

> > Anyway, I guess the Persian translators of free software (as few as they
> > are now) won't have the time to maintain two different branches.

This, I believe is true for every language from economically
impoverished domains that are being facilitated through free software.

This is certainly true for Tamil... I recently discovered why the few
elaborate inquires made on Unicode related issues never seem to
materialise as active volunteers. There are other teams springing up
elsewhere caught up in confusions of Linux advocacy (without freedom as
a goal) or distro specific issues. There are even attempts to document
specific apps and distros. And I just discovered the PO licences are
also abused and amalgamated with non free glossaries just to find the
easy solution!
(Time to put the foot down I guess)

> I don't know, but since there is a fallback mechanism built-in,
> "incomplete" branches are not that bad; quite the opposite, "incomplete"
> branches are a valid solution, too.

What I am trying to say is that the great freedoms of software does need
a big helping of free attitude among translators. This boils down to
clearly documented actions by coordinators and trust placed on them by
the i18n team. With freedom as a goal FS community could and should
actually back the translators than trying to get thet statistics full.
This is purely non technical and is full of the human touch.

A related example. Recently the ta tree was discovered to be infected
with non UTF-8 strings. It was never documented so basically ended up
wasting many people's enthusiasm and broke the flow of the l10n effort
until discovered through painful analysis. 
The freedom to use a non standard encoding through a hack to glibc and
minimal human coordination while implementing it was the primary cause.

Peace and best wishes,

Ramanan