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Zagreb reporting — chapter 2
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Juggling circus in ZagrebOpen Translation Tools is rolling on nicely. We’re having some interesting discussions covering almost every aspect of localization. I’m glad to notice that there aren’t only technical discussions, and the atmosphere is to study what the needs are and how could they be covered.
Two interesting topics that receive attention are community management and translation workflows. Open source projects like GNOME, Fedora and other ones are lucky to have an awesome community very motivated to contribute. Not all projects are that lucky though, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the translators don’t want to contribute to that project. It might just mean that they haven’t heard about it or that it’s too difficult to do it in a systematic way.
Take FLOSS manuals for example. It’s a cool project that helps you compose documentation in a wiki-style way, which can end up in a PDF or even a book from lulu. While they do it in a novel and useful way, they face some challenges in the translation aspect, like how to find translators and make it easy for them to keep up with the projects new docs.
Another challenage is the workflow they will adopt. Create a new community using a custom web-based tool or do it on top of PO/XLIFF files available for external communities to contribute to? While with the first approach you may save resources (arguable!), with the latter one (small, modular tools over standard file formats) you get interoperability with other tools like Damned Lies, Transifex and Pootle, and can give the opportunity to remote communities to contribute to your project.
On the technical side, we had some really interesting discussions. With Danilo Šegan of GNOME fame and Dwayne Bailey of Pootle and Translate Toolkit fame, we discussed how to increase interoperability between the tools we write. For example, having a common object model and standard APIs would greatly help in having all three tools (Damned Lies, Transifex, Pootle) work together in an integrated fashion.
Off to the event’s most anticipated party. Each participant brought an alcoholic beverage from their country. Add to that huge amounts of beer, several bottles of local vodka, etc and you might come close to what’s going to take place. From Greece I brought (what else) Ouzo, the anise-flavor liqueur that usually accompanies fresh seafood in Greece.