Re: Xhosa GNOME translation project

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2005-01-06 klockan 18:17 +0200 skrev Adi Attar:
> At the Ubuntu Linux conference last month, we decided to undertake a rather
> tight-deadlined translation of as much of the desktop as possible into Xhosa
> (one of the local South African languages). Being the most organised and
> accessible of all the projects, I thought GNOME was an excellent place to start.
> 
> The initial translation will be undertaken by a small team of Xhosa
> translators in South Africa and we hope (rather optimistically) to have a
> significant portion of GNOME 2.10 translated before its release. My role is to
> coordinate the project and the translators.
> 
> I have read much of the documentation on the website, so hopefully have some
> clue about what to do :) but any help and suggestions are most definitely welcome.

Support for Xhosa [xh] is most welcome in GNOME. I've added your name
and e-mail address to the teams page at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/teams.html now. Please verify
that this listing is correct.

I'll also send a mail in private to you with a request for Bugzilla
details. Bugzilla is our bug tracker that we use for tracking bug
reports in software, and, in this case also translations. 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 translation process can be found at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/l10n-guide/.


I'd recommend starting with translating what will eventually become
GNOME 2.10.
You can find a preliminary list of included software in GNOME 2.10 at
the translation status pages on http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/
under the "desktop", "developer-libs" and "proposed" sections. Those are
the things to translate for full support of the official GNOME release.
Note that this list is preliminary and bound to change somewhat, but
even so, I think you should try to start translating it as soon as
possible. You can find the 2.10 release schedule at
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.9/.

You can get the potfiles to translate for GNOME 2.10, as an example,
from the http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/ia/developer-libs/ ,
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/ia/desktop/ and
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/ia/proposed/ pages.

You'll get your own
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/xh/developer-libs/ , 
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/xh/desktop/ and
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/xh/proposed/ translation status
pages as soon as the first xh.po is committed to the GNOME cvs
repository.

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 commit the files) and we'll try to put them into cvs for
you. Just make sure that the po files pass a test with "msgfmt -cvv
xh.po" without errors or warnings, 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've contributed a few translations this way, you can apply for a
cvs account of your own at
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/policies/accounts/, so that you can put
translations directly into cvs later on.

Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!

Thanks, and welcome,

Christian