Non-community-based approaches to localisation

[Gora Mohanty <gora sarai net>]

Hi,
  The GNOME localisation community in India is faced
with a very peculiar situation, and it would be good
to arrive at a consensus on how to deal with this.

  The BossLinux (http://bosslinux.in/) folk based at
CDAC-Chennai have gone ahead, and translated large
parts of GNOME (I believe version 2.18) into 18
Indian languages. These are available at 
http://downloads.bosslinux.in/Translated_Po_files/
I applaud the scale of this effort, but unfortunately
there are some serious drawbacks here that make it
difficult, if not impossible for this work to be
integrated into GNOME:
1. I know of no attempt to contact existing language
   teams prior to starting on this work. This is true
   at least of Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Oriya.
   Worse yet, the language team line in the .po file
   header has been changed to some CDAC address, which
   can only lead to myriad problems down the road.
2. As CDAC made no attempt to talk to people about
   consistency, the translation terms used are out
   of sync with accepted ones that were used earlier.
   At least for Hindi, and now increasingly for other
   language, the terms that the FOSS community uses
   are reviewed by outsiders.
3. The translation quality is low, at least in the
   Oriya .po files that I saw. For example, "parent"
   as in "parent process" has been translated into
   the equivalent of "biological parent".
4. CDAC has offered these files up for the community
   to submit upstream, but has apparently no intentions
   of being involved in the process.