Lessons I learned as a translation guy
This post is my 2 cents about Jad’s latest post trying to stir things up and attract more translators to the Ubuntu community! Having led the Brazilian team for a couple of years myself, I wanted to point out a couple of things I’ve learned along the way. Obviously advices are best taken when asked for, but here it goes anyway:
- Beware that 300 volunteers working at the same time without a robust and clear way of knowing who’s doing what will make it impossible for your team to manage;
- Also, with this many people contributing with single, hand picked strings is extremelly detrimental to the overal quality of the entire package, not to mention the entire suite;
- I have always liked the idea of contributions being done upstream first, and then tricklying it down to distros and what not. It is my dream and goal to make sure that Ubuntu reverses this trend and start sending contributions upstream (translations). Check out my blueprint: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/translation-workflow-and-notification-system
Well, back to work I go. 
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August 28th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I really like your idea!!
Hugs!!
August 28th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
This really is something that I hate in Ubuntu: the lack of upstream cooperation, especially in translation (which is an area in which Ubuntu particularly excels).
I’m glad that one of the heads of the Ubuntu translators wants to move forward to contribute directly to upstream. This means a lot as this is (I think) one of the main critics from non-Ubunteros.
The Fedora community recently created Transifex. This is a tool that enables translator to translate directly to upstream of lots of projects without opening an SCM account in all of those projects. You have one Transifex account, and Transifex has its own accounts to all the SCM of the projects that want to use Transifex.
This really leverages the work of the translators that can concentrate their efforts towards translation, it helps managing the group as everything is always returned upstream directly, and it enables small projects to have a huge community of translators that would otherwise never have discovered them.
You should really check it: http://transifex.org/
August 28th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Great tip Bochecha!!! Thanks!
August 29th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Finally someone started to blog about it. Your blueprint is truly seconded, and your worries about quality are resonate in me too.
Thanks for spotlighting this!