Re: Starting Sudanese Team

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2004-03-04 klockan 12.31 skrev Barış Yoluç:
> As we mentioned our efforts are of two fold. Developing and widening.
> By Sudanese (not as language, as nationality) we ment Arabic.

Ok, so the locale you want to support is "ar_SD" (Arabic in Sudan). That
certainly makes it much clearer.


> However as our contacts are in Sudan and our aim is to convince the
> Sudanese Government to make this OS their national OS and distribute
> this free of licese to the end users we wanted to start a Sudanese
> team. We don't know how it will be possible according to your team
> structures and appreciate any suggestions (as if it is possible to
> create a subteam under arabic "language team" or not.).  

This is not usually how things are done with translations in free
software projects. We only create subgroups of languages for certain
countries if they are needed; that is, if there are enough lingustic
differences to warrant it, and developer manpower to support it.
As an example, there are very few differences between de_DE (German as
spoken in Germany) and de_AT (German as spoken in Austria), at least in
writing. So there's not much point in seperating the two and have two
seperate translation efforts in parallel. Having a single German effort
helps both the development and also the users, as both de_DE and de_AT
users will get the same 'de' translations. Seperating the translation
efforts would mean that one translation effort would always lag behind
the other, and not be a very effective use of translator resources.

Then again, there are some languages that due to seperation, both
geographically, culturally and politically, have gone seperate ways in
different countries, and resulted in substantial linguistic differences.
The most wellknown example of that are of course pt_BR (Portuguese as
spoken in Brazil) and pt_PT (Portuguese as spoken in Portugal), and also
en_US, en_CA, and en_GB. For such languages there may be wellgrounded
lingustic reasons for having seperate translation efforts.


Many countries in the world use Arabic as the language, and we already
have an Arabic team in the GTP. Thus, I do not see the point in creating
a seperate translation team for ar_SD, unless there are substantial
linguistic differences between "common" Arabic and the Arabic spoken in
Sudan. Unless you can give some proof that this should be the case, I
strongly urge you to cooperate with the existing Arabic translation team
in improving the Arabic support.

Note that this decision is, and should be, just based on a language
level and lingustic merits -- that your company may have special
business interests with the government of Sudan is very much irrelevant
to the question of whether the GNOME Translation Project should have a
seperate ar_SD team, at least from the GTP perspective.


> > Also, for the coordinator role as any other position in a larger
> free
> > software project, we expect the holders of those positions to act as
> > individuals, and not as the representatives for any corporate
> interest,
> > such as the companies that may employ these individuals.
>  
> Again as we mentioned before we fully support your aim of "a larger
> free software project" and don't intend to obtain any commercial gain 
> from the sales of the outcome. We gave a detailed information about
> our intensions and our special company structure and I assure you
> being a company has no difference in our situation than being an
> individual. You can also accept "Mehmet Ali Erdal" as the coordinator
> if it is more appropriate for you.

Thank you, I have noted now that Mehmet Ali Erdal
<maerdal@istanbulconsulting.net> wants to volunteer as coordinator for
an ar_SD team. But that team is still hypotethical at this point; we
shouldn't create it until we are absolutely sure it's needed. So I'd
really like to hear some facts on whether there are substantial
differences between "common" Arabic and the one spoken in Sudan. I'd
also like to hear the opinion of the existing Arabic team coordinator
(cc:ed) on that matter.

In case there isn't any substantial differences, I strongly urge you to
cooperate with the existing Arabic team in improving the Arabic
translation support. I'm sure your help is *most* welcome!


Christian



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