Personal thought on software localization

Dear all,

This academic year I teach the course "IT for translators" and in a couple
of weeks I'm starting the part of software localization. While my students
often have some experience with translating typical artistic and technical
texts, software localization tends to be a very new experience to them. I
typically begin the part of the course with some of my personal thoughts
about working in an open source project, but I'm also interested in
thoughts and opinions that you, my fellow translators, have. Any comments
and opinions are welcome :)

As for me, I decided to help with the localization of Freeciv, because I
was annoyed with all the English messages mixed with the Polish ones in the
interface around version 2.1. I have never had any formal training or
previous experience in using gettext, so I've learned everything from
various websites. I'm happy that I didn't know the stats the Polish
translation, because I might get a bit doscpuraged... (I wasn't using
Poedit at that time). It seemed that a translating hundred phrases or so
would make the translation complete, but the untranslated phrases kept
popping up and I ended up translating probably more than 1000 phrases
before the Polish locale was complete. I don't really like translating
regular texts, but I find localization fun!

Best wishes,
Hubert