Re: Status of Dzongkha translations

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> El ds 03 de 09 de 2011 a les 22:33 +0200, en/na Andre Klapper va
> escriure:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Yesterday I tried to contact ~17 GNOME translation team leaders of teams
>> that look like losing translation coverage[1].
>>
>> (In general I think that the GNOME translation community should be more
>> active in identifying potential problems and help with outreach to
>> downstream translation teams[2][3][4].
>> I'm interested in thoughts of others on this.)
>
> I left Desktop Summit with this idea floating around, thanks for
> bringing it up.
>
> Yes definitely is a must-do. LibreOffice, Firefox or Wikipedia have more
> translation teams than GNOME, so...
> - Which ones are we missing?
> - How we can encourage them to start translating GNOME?
> - How can make it easier for them to start with?
>
> And some more questions can arise, the second one (outreaching) is the
> key, but how to tackle it? Just spamming them? :) Contacting with the
> LibreOffice/Firefox/Wikipedia/whatever project l10n coordinators to ask
> them about how to tackle their translation community? There's plenty of
> debate around, anyone taking a lead?
>
> Cheers,
>
>> As a first result to mention here, I received a 550 delivery failure for
>> the email address of the Dzongkha team[5] leader (CC'ed).
>>
>> How to proceed? Make it a "There is currently no established team for
>> this language." on l10n.gnome.org for the time being?
>> Contact downstream teams whether they somebody is interested in helping
>> upstream?
>>

GNOME is certainly not alone to have difficulty maintaining language
teams in certain languages.  Upstream / downstream communication and
collaboration on L10n is an important community development activity.
In the case of the Sugar Labs / OLPC Pootle instance, I've created a
set of dummy PO files that are intended to serve as upstream tracking
tickets [1] that also leave a "trail of breadcrumbs" to the upstream
projects we pull into the GNOME boot side of OLPC's dual-boot builds.
The idea is to make clear to our L10n community how much we are
dependent on the upstream for L10n bits and to encourage upstream (and
downstream) migration of L10n skills.

Claude Paroz was kind enough to create an OLPC release set that I can
manage to make this easier to track within GNOME infrastructure. [2]

We have also performed outreach to upstream projects that were using
"send-PO-to-the-mailing-list" L10n workflows without a central
database (e.g. AbiWord and Gnash) in the form of offering them hosting
on our Pootle instance. [3]

I believe there are a certain common patterns that can explain a
decline from a high level of coverage over time.

1) A team forms galvanized by some one-time event, e.g .a conference,
hackfest, grant funding, etc.) and achieves good coverage at a given
point in time, but there is failure to maintain momentum and keep up
with growing string sets.

2) Loss of activity by an individual "supersatar" localizer.  For
example (I ask only partly in jest), is there any FOSS project that
wasn't mostly completed in Vietnamese by the inimitable Clytie
Siddall?

I believe that part of the answer is to actively encourage mobility
within FOSS L10n communities, but to some extent that is a zero-sum
game.  Someone working on my strings is not working on yours and we
must be careful to not appear to be trying to "poach" localizers from
each other, which is mostly impossible anyway because localizers will
work where they choose.   Gnome localizers are always welcome to reach
out to the Sugar Labs / OLPC / eToys L10n community via our list  [4]
and they are particularly welcome to prioritize their Gnome
contributions to those packages we pull for our builds :-)

I believe the more important approach is to increase the total number
of people involved in L10n work, particularly in the non-European
languages that generally have smaller L10n communities.  The venues
that seem worth reaching out to include:

1) Local Linux user groups.  However, it must be understood that in
certain cultures and countries an individual with the talents we are
seeking will understandably be employing them fully to advance their
family's economic circumstances.

2) Academia, particularly computer sciences and languages departments.

3) NGO's with large local footprints (particularly those engaged in ICT4D).

4) Ex-patriate communities looking to maintain a connection to their
mother tongue and culture.

5 ) Multilingual FOSS developers.  Surprisingly, they give freely of
their own time to code, but  are sometimes less inclined to spend time
localizing another developer's strings or even their own code into
their native language.  There seems to be a belief that their time is
best spent on developing new code, perhaps understandably, but I think
emphasizing the amplifying effect of L10n on the potential audience
for the whole FOSS ecosystem might convince some to take a break from
coding during string freezes to put on their L10n hats.

Those are just a few of my thoughts on the matter.

cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator

[1]  http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/upstream_l10n/
[2]  http://l10n.gnome.org/releases/olpc/
[3]  http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/upstream_POT/
[4]  http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization