Ubuntu 11.04 Translations Plans

[Andrej Žnidaršič]

Hello !

For attracting new translators i believe most of the effort must be done by
each local translation team.
>From my experience one needs to show to the other people that it's fun and
rewarding thing to do.
Also a team should get a chatroom where people interested in translations or
translators can share info, discuss, coordinate, etc.
In our case we used jabber chat room from http://partychapp.appspot.com/ as
many new contributors were not comfortable/had difficulities with irc but
almost all had google /jabber accounts.

About string reorganization: I don't think singificantly more people will
translate if they see easy strings first. They might translate first few,
but they are going to stop at difficult ones. In my opinion easy strings
like "Add" are of medium importance as most people already know what they
mean or can easily look it up (i guess it depends on the country one comes
from). What is the most important are long, "difficult" strings as one
cannot look them up in a dictionary / online.

I agree the most important think translations should focus is easy upstream
coordination. both ways. For example, a translation was imported from compiz
into launchpad, by a person who i cannot contact. There were some bugs in
translations. We fixed them and wanted to send the .po file upstream.
Unfortunately slovenian team does not exist for compiz and they only have
pootble for translation (cannot import .po). After half an hour hunting for
people on irc i was redirected to ubuntu package maintainters, but i don't
think they can contribute directly to upstream (will ask them, need to
check). There are lots of "small" projects (in terms of translations) like
compiz.
Of course it would be best if the translations were automatically signed.
But even if some simplificaion of the process would be really great.
I think it would be really great if;
a) there would be a list of all packages with links with upstream
and even better if we could assign some people who have good contact with
smaller upstream projects (meaning excluding Gnome, kde, debian and
translaton project, possibly package maintainers), so that we could send
them the .po files and they would know who they should send it to and how
should they commit it. This would save people a massive amount of time as we
don't need to hunt down the people thorugh which we can commit the packages.
Also the people responsible wouldn't have too much work, as i imagine not
all transaltion teams will be use it / be strong enough (in terms of
activity) to push significant number of packages upstream.
If anyone has any idea how this could be improved, this is most welcome.

My other suggestion is to make some youtube videos, which show how easy it's
to use launchpad. When people see it's very easy they get motivated faster.

Andrej

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things
brought together.
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