Re: GUADEC's GTP BoF summary

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

El dc 01 de 08 de 2012 a les 11:11 -0400, en/na Chris Leonard va
escriure:
> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 7:00 AM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> > Wow, that's quite a lot of acronyms :)
> >
> > Anyway on topic...
> >
> > As some of you have already seen we (all translators and GTP Coordinator
> > members) that were at this year's GUADEC meet on 30th of July all day
> > long to discuss about the 14 topics listed on the wiki page about the
> > meeting:
> > https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012
> 
> Thanks for the summary of the discussion for those of us who could not
> attend GUADEC.

You are welcome, is a pity that this world is so big that we can not
easily meet in person :(

I just sent an email telling that I updated the minutes, I hope that now
you can understand them better ;)

> > Please bear with us, as the notes maybe do not make much sense for
> > someone not on the BoF. We all (BoF attendees) will try to clean them up
> > and maybe it would make sense to send a mail (even if that will be 14
> > mails) on this mailing list explaining the idea of each of them.
> >
> > This way we can add every one of you on the loop of the current
> > activities and motivations behind all this 14 points.
> 
> There does not appear to be a Discussion page on the wiki, so I am
> hoping that comments on this list about individual elements of the 14
> follow-up actions points will be welcomed.  Otherwise, please specify
> an alternate feedback mechanism.

Yep, just bear with us for a few hours or so until I can send a mail for
all items.

> Item: Making guidelines
> 
> As Gil previously mentioned, it is indeed great to see new languages
> coming to Gnome.
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2012-July/msg00118.html
> 
> I went looking the documentation on the wiki that offered general
> advice to new language teams on how to prioritize their work on Gnome
> and the best guidance I've found is this:
> 
> https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/LocalisationGuide?highlight=%28CategoryGnomeI18n%29#Choosing_the_first_packages_to_translate
> 
> I think some more extensive guidance on prioritization would be very helpful.
> 
> Consider the daunting scope facing a team first looking at Gnome L10n:
> 
> 41K   3.6 release set
>  3.3K External Dependencies (GNOME) release set
> 11K   GNOME-Office Productivity Applications
>  4.2K GNOME Infrastructure
> 10K   GIMP and Friends
> 10K   Extra GNOME Applications (stable)
> 
> ~80K total
> 
> At the risk of sounding self-serving, one might consider suggesting
> the OLPC Release set as a starting point.
> 
> ~30K  OLPC Release set (drawn from across the above Release Sets on
> the basis of providing a minimalist, but fully functional Gnome boot
> on OLPC OS images.)  Admittedly this is not perfect.  Some clearly
> lower priority items are included.
> 
>  4.2K from GIMP and Friends
>  6.8K from libg-weather
>  5.8K from gnumeric
> 
> which do not necessarily merit prioritization in the overall scheme of
> things.  Skipping these would give an OLPC designated set in the 13.2
> K range covering a lot of highly user-visible packages.

Your counting is on strings, which is not that much useful, take a look
at the slides about how much is translating GNOME 3.6 (165k words when I
did my last counting with pocount).

Thanks for offering OLPC as a basic starting point for translators,
maybe for the badge idea (giving badges to translators: a11y, OLPC...).

There's already an item for splitting up the modules, prioritizing them
within a set and also the calendar idea to let translators know that,
say OLPC, is about to release a new version in 3 weeks and that is the
best time to spend translation time on that module/module set.

> 
> Item: Just reaching out to local communities
> 
> I personally think the concerns about perceived "poaching" of
> localizers is overblown and even a little insulting to localizers.
> Localizers are free agents and work on what they choose, when they
> choose.  In my experience, localizers are (for the most part)
> characterized by language loyalty more than package/distro loyalty.

Fully agree, that's why one of the points on one item is about
contacting the GTP Coordinator team equals on other FOSS projects to see
how we can improve the situation for translators, not make it worse
(say, share translation memories, pretranslate po files with that
memory, quality tools...)

> Another option which carries no "poaching" stigma is to promote Ui
> string harmonization across orthologous packages (packages performing
> the same or similar functions in different distros).  For example, why
> do Gnuchess, glchess from gnome-games and Knights from KDE have so few
> strings in common?  Surely the basic text to describe a chess game
> could be harmonized to a greater extent and shared across these
> packages whose primary differentiation has to do with back-end chess
> engine support.  Newspaper chess columns (for those of you who still
> look at print media), has standardized on a short and frankly ugly
> alphanumeric terminology for describing chess moves and entire games
> in a compact fashion.  Surely, we can do nearly as well.

That should be up to developers, or projects in some sense, as maybe
they want to use some kind of another language and so on. Sure is not
good to have different strings for same actions, but instead of forcing
modules to change their wording, having better tools to translate will
ease that at least in some parts.

> There are also clear opportunities in word processors and other
> commonly implemented packages (networking apps, etc.).  How many
> different strings does the FOSS world really need to describe
> indentation and other common typesetting functions?

Agree, but go chasing all developers to change their wording...

> English searches in open-tran.eu will identify plenty of chances to
> reduce string variability (and increase consistency) across projects,
> some of which might even be appealing to developers if offered in the
> context of more rapid or broader L10n coverage.

Yeah, that's my point, we are doing, as a translators, an outstanding
job, just provide us with better tools and it will be really really
great.

> Item: glibc locales.
> I definitely have some strong opinions in this area, but I'll table
> them for now as this message has rambled on long enough.

I'm more than eager to know about them, I just don't know anything about
how that works, and we should have some knowledge on it, so that we can
actually help new translation teams be more effective.

> These are just a few thoughts of my own on some the agenda topics raised.
> 
> Warmest Regards,
> 
> cjl
> Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator

Thanks a *lot* for giving this early feedback, hopefully late today I
will be able to send the mails. If not, feel free to send the
kickstarter email for any of the discussions you feel like you want to
start discussing.

Happy translating!
-- 
Gil Forcada

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