Re: Milestones: i18n

Hi Heikki,
See comments in line.


Heikki Toivonen wrote:
> Brian Kirsch wrote:
>   
>> I am proposing that we do not accept translations from the community
>> till the 1.0 release.
>>     
>
> I think we should accept translations. We wouldn't really need to
> maintain them though - that can be done by volunteers.
>   
It is not that I do not want to accept translations. It is that I worry 
with the other stuff on
my plate ie. mail that I not get distracted on non-mission critical tasks.

If someone else wanted to be the owner and maintainer of localizations
I am certainly all for that.

We really don't need to tackle this task till 1.0.

> There are a couple of ways to go with this. My preference would be that
> we house the translations at OSAF, which becomes the canonical place for
> Chandler localizations. 


The end goal is to leverage pootle. Which is an open source on line 
translation server
that is getting a lot of attention as of late.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle

It will provide us with the needed framework to allow users to translate 
and review translations
of the project and as an added bonus it is written in Python.

> We would either need to checkin patches from
> localizers, or give localizers enough access to let them maintain the
> localizations themselves. Either way, doesn't seem like a lot of work.
>   


It not that its is a lot of work  but it can prove to be time consuming 
to accept
translations too early in the development cycle.

I have 20 emails in my OSAF account from users who are really excited to 
start translating
the product as soon as possible.

If each one of those users needs to ask questions or needs other types 
of guidance that
can prove to be a distraction and a time hog. There is also the review 
process.
Did the person correctly translate the product? That involve 
coordinating with a second
person who can review the submitted translation.

So again I would love to do it but in order to release a killer 1.0 
product I think my time
is better spent elsewhere.
 
I don't see this as mission critical as long as by 1.0 we are able to
accept and maintain translations from the community.


-Brian

> Another way is to more or less give the task of localization completely
> to outsiders. We might house a wiki page pointing to some external
> Chandler localization project.
>
> I have some experience with the decentralized localization effort in
> early Mozilla days, and it was very frustrating. There were several
> separate teams working on any given language who did not coordinate
> their work. You could download and install several incomplete language
> packs for the same locale. Once localizations were checked into the
> Mozilla CVS things became clear and quality went up.
>
>   
>   



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-- 
Brian Kirsch 
Internationalization Architect / Mail Service Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard Street 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
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