Rosetta-Feedback - UDS Prague

[Neskie Manuel]

Weytk-p (Hello Everyone),

I am the lead person on the Ubuntu Secwepemc Translators team.  We are
a completly new team coming from zero localization.  This would be the
same for any North American Indigenous Language [1] [2].  We don't
have any problems with syncing with upstream since there is no
upstream.

The main problem all of these languages are facing before they can
even use Rosetta is getting basic support.  This includes:

 * ORTHOGRAPHIC Having the orthographic information as part of
Fontconfig.  I've been adding orthographic information to fontconfig
with the aid of [2].  Gnome uses this to determine which languages are
displayable.  I dont know how KDE does it.  Having this information allows
teams to know which fonts they can use by typing fc-list :lang=ISO_CODE.

 * FONTS. Having a font that displays all of their characters
currently in Debian and Ubuntu the only font that displays all of the
various North American Indigenous Languages is the package
ttf-lg-aboriginal.   DejaVu has a subset for some but not all North
American Orthographies.

 * KEYBOARDS. Once a font support is available, these languages need a
way to input their language efficiently.  I've written a Cherokee (
really cool story behind the script) xkb keyboard, a Secwepemctsin
keyboard.  There has been an Inuktitut xkb keyboard for some time now.
 Inuktitut covers one sort of syllabics, but there is also the need
for a Blackfoot, Ojibway, Cree, and Naskapi syllabics as well.  These
are the languages with the largest amount of speakers in Canada.

 * COLLATION. Actually I don't really know anything about this but
know you need it for the next major thing required....

 * TIME.  The names of the months and days and the first day of the
week is need to create locales, in the case of North American
Indigenous languages this could be retrieved from First Voices [3].

 * LOCALE. There are currently no locales that have been created for
and submitted to glibc for any North American Indigenous Languages
except: Secwepemctsin (shs_CA).  I have created locales for Naskapi
(nsk_CA), Ktunaxa (kut_CA), Mi'kmaw (mic_CA), and Ojibwe (oji_CA).
These are unverified as of yet, but should be fine.

These are some of the things that I've had to learn as I start using
Rosetta ands translating Ubuntu.  Rosetta should reflect the fact that
some people will be starting from a point of no localization and will
have to implement the above items.  I would like to work with somone,
interested on implementing features and writing/collecting
documentation that would make this easier for other new translation
teams.   This would be helpful for groups in North America, Papua New
Guinea, South America, and other areas where people are starting
fresh.

Yeri Tsucws (That's All)
-Neskie

[1] - http://wiki.debian.org/I18n/NorthAmericanIndigenousLanguages
[2] - http://www.languagegeek.com/alllangs/listoflangs.html
[3] - http://firstvoices.ca