Translation challenges for One Laptop Per Child

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi Tom,

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 02:18:05AM -1000, Tom M wrote:
> There was a recent blog post by Jim Getty on the translation
> challenges OLPC faces, one important point is that lack of connectivty
> in many countrys suggests that some mechanism for collaborative but
> largely offline translation is needed.
> 
> http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/?p=22

As Matthew just pointed out, I already replied to Jim's post on my own
post:
http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/rosetta-langpacks-olpc-2006-03-27-22-10

My article did leave the offline translation question open though, as
Rosetta and Launchpad, right now, are designed to be used with *some*
network access.

You can use Rosetta to manage your translations, using the export ->
work offline -> import methodology, but of course, the export and import
process requires network access.

For environments where _no_ network access is possible, at all, a
different strategy should be used. It would be difficult to coordinate a
distributed effort in such situation though. With some network access,
the traditional way of handling a team of translations is having a
mailing list and a way of requesting/assigning/reviewing translations.

Some Debian translation teams have been using a simple, mail based
system. You can see how it works for the Catalan team in
http://ca.debian.net/ (in Catalan only), but the basic idea is that a
program that filters email parses specially formatted Subject headers
which are used to request translations (Intent To Translate), request
revisions (Request For Review), etc.

The output of such a method would be then fed to Rosetta every now and
then, at some place where network access is possible (an internet
cafe...)

The negative part of this is that people wouldn't be able to use
Rosetta's transaltion interface, which is helpful for computer-illiterate
translators as the process is really, really simple. You don't even have
to deal with po files at all.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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