-
Paul on L10n
-
Quoting Paul’s interview on c|net:
There are also a lot of interesting community/project things going on. Transifex is a cool tool for facilitation localization. If you have a pet project that you’re interested in having someone within or outside Fedora localize, you can submit it no matter what source management system it uses on the back-end. Those communities can immediately start working on it. From the project page: “Translators can use Fedora Web-based tools to contribute directly to any upstream project, large or small, through one translator-oriented Web interface. Developers of projects with no existing translation community can easily reach out to Fedora’s established community for translations. In turn, the latter can reach out to numerous projects related to Fedora to easily contribute translations.” Again, the Fedora community revolves around software, but there is more room in the community than simply for developers. Others can and do play important roles.
Paul, I just realized that the person who put the whole L10n re-engineering madnes^Wstory in my mind was actually you. I might as well start referring to you as “the guy that gave me that irritating itch”. I remember watching you copy around PO files from cvs.fpo to elvis every time you wanted your release notes localized, often doing re-syncs and re-merges for small updates in the doc source. And it happened more than once in each release cycle. And that was almost sad.
I remember thinking to myself “hell, this guy has better things to do with his time”.
The Docs Project was the first entity that used the ‘cvsl10n’ FAS group. In Fedora 7, we decided to be bold, and for the first time, give the opportunity to Fedora translators to work directly on the files hosted on the Fedora servers. The truth is, things did look risky back then. We had maybe less than 80 people in the cvsl10n group, compared to elvis, which had 2000 translators. We also had a different translation workflow, a separated time schedule and freezes than the rest of Fedora, and no statistics interface. While one would expect that the Fedora 7 release notes would ship in fewer languages and be of inferior quality, they not only caught up with FC6, but were actually shipped in more languages. And not only that, we did manage to save Paul from the time to juggle PO files all over the place.
Next goal: Have all tools work flawlessly (Makefile targets, Transifex notifications, Bodhi integration) and perfect Documentation so that developers and documenters worry about translations a tenth of how much they do today, and work on more interesting and creative things.
Boston Commons park, USA