Re: translation project for local university

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Umarzuki Mochlis <umarzuki gmail com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I was contacted by a lecturer in a local university that he had approached the dean at his university to have a project where students will volunteer to the gnome translation in Malay and the university will get some sort of a recognition for this effort.

How this could be done. Any legalities involved?

This could be a good start for a Gnome community in Malaysia.

Attribution for each person's work is a good thing and the current way to do it is when making commits,
to add the Author field for each work a person has done. Then, it is technically possible to extract
statistics for the quantity of the work of each person.
For example, see the commit at
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=e2bbf8398b564805bb1a93cf7ec853b90a440dec
where the Author gets credited for their work.

My suggestion is to try to get the lecturer/students to work on GNOME because they want to create a quality Malay translation and make better the stats that appear at http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/ms/

If you put too much emphasis for recognition from an outside source, the initiative will be weaker in the long run.

Thus, my recommendation would be
1. try to make better the page at http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/ms/

It helps to put a photo, you can add a website and then a mailing list for the team communication.

2. Sort out the committer situation for Malay. Once you get your committer, add them in the Committer section at 

http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/ms/ (if *you* are the single committer, you do not appear in the Committer list, since you are also the Team coordinator).
Make sure your committer attributes correctly each translation using the Author field in the commits. If there are more people contributing in a translation, you can add them all in the Git commit message.

For each translation that a person does, you can show them a link like
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=e2bbf8398b564805bb1a93cf7ec853b90a440dec

which has the Author name.

3. When you demonstrate the live GNOME desktop in the (partial) Malay localisation, you can show the Translation credits (in the Help button) which shows the list of the translators. The original translation of GNOME was done by Hasbullah Bin Pit. I had a look at 'eog' and I noticed that Hasbullah added the text

msgid "translator-credits"
msgstr ""
"Hasbullah Bin Pit <sebol at my-penguin dοt org>\n"
"I Love my wife & my son (Umar)"

which is cool as it is, and for your future presentations.

Thus, translators will be able to have their name in each of the newer GNOME installation in the Malay language.

4. It is technically possible to obtain stats for the work of each person by reading the Git repositories.

Some work that is forever in development can be found at 
https://github.com/simos/gnome-l10n-translator-stats

5. You can explain to your team that the achievement they can receive for their translation work is to become GNOME Foundation members. This is a big recognition.

Simos