Re: New Africa language translations - Afrikaans, Zulu, NorthernSotho

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-03-28 klockan 16.20 skrev Dwayne Bailey:
> We will be delivering some new translations for African languages 
> including Afrikaans, Northern Sotho and Zulu.

This is most excellent news, and I can't tell you how I excited I am
about it!


> Afrikaans - we will work together with the language coordinator on this one
> 
> Zulu:
> iso639 - zu, zul
> native - IsiZulu
> coordinator: Dwayne Bailey <dwayne@translate.org.za>
> url: translate.org.za
> 
> Northern Sotho:
> iso639 - n/a, nso
> native - Sesotho sa Leboa
> coordinator: Dwayne Bailey <dwayne@translate.org.za>
> url: translate.org.za

I've added the two new teams to the
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/teams.html page -- please make
sure that this listing is correct (it can take a while for the new
content to show up though).

I'll also send a mail in private to you with a request for bugzilla
details for these two languages. Please reply to that mail as soon as
possible.

Other than that, please ask around on this mailing list or at the IRC
channel #i18n on irc.gnome.org if you need help getting started. An
introduction to the GNOME translation process can be found at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/l10n-guide/.


For a new team I'd recommend starting with translating GNOME 2.6, even
though it will be released very soon. Even if you probably won't make it
to the 2.6.0 release a couple of days from now, any translations can if
committed in time be released with 2.6.1 and so on and the rest of the
2.6 series (you can see the 2.6 release schedule at
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/).

You can find a list of included software in GNOME 2.6 at the translation
status pages on
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/ under the
"desktop" and "developer-libs" sections. Those are the things to
translate for full support of the official GNOME release.

In the case of Afrikaans, you'll find links to the pot and po files to
translate for GNOME on the status pages at the 
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/af/developer-libs/
and
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/af/desktop/
pages respectively.

In the case of Northern Sotho and Zulu, you can get the potfiles to
translate, as an example, from the
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/kw/developer-libs/
and
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/kw/desktop/
pages. Once there has been some Northern Sotho and/or Zulu translations
committed to CVS, you'll automatically get seperate translation status
pages for these languages aswell:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/nso/developer-libs/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/nso/desktop/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/zu/developer-libs/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/zu/desktop/


When the time comes for GNOME 2.8 development and we know more about
what software that GNOME release will contain, we'll create GNOME 2.8
translation status pages and announce it to this (gnome-i18n@gnome.org)
list. But I'd recommend starting right away with GNOME 2.6 if possible,
since you'll be able to automatically reuse a lot of translations in
GNOME 2.8 when that time comes.


Once you have translated some of the pot files referenced above, you can
send the resulting po files to me (or someone else with cvs access
willing to do comit the files) and we'll try to put them into cvs for
you. Just make sure that the files pass a test with msgfmt without
errors, that they're encoded in UTF-8, and that you compress them using
gzip before attaching them to the mail. Or you can put the files on a
web page somewhere, and we can fetch them from there.

Once you or someone else in your teams contributed a few translations
this way, we can arrange cvs accounts for you, so that you can put
translations directly into cvs later on.

And last but not least -- don't hesitate to ask if you have any
questions!


Thanks, and welcome,

Christian