Salam The more I look into the men count that we have for translation, the more I realise we are in a sore need for more translators. For example, for gnome 2.16, which is expected to be completed somewhere at the start of September, I'm seeing only three dedicated translators, the maintainer who is too stretched out and still doing a heck of a job (thank you Youssef), Raffah and myself. Let me put it simply to you: Arabic Gnome 2.16 won't ship with only us, I've thought about this realistically for a long time. Translation projects are slipping from under our attention quickly. Thankfully, we just barely have enough time to do something about it.
Please take this seriously, we took it upon ourselves to be The Ones(tm) when it came to Arabic translation, so we should live up to the responsibility, Arabeyes is always here, and will never go under. The actual task: the translation should be the end goal, not the popularity of a website or the dedication of a handful of team members. The current system is too high for many potential translators, we're not gaining anything from it, we're actually locking people out of the translation effort in the name of "dedication" and "commitment", a goal Arabeyes has not even achieved beyond a couple dozen or so part-time translators. We need to make things *work*, not to over analyse people's behaviour philosophically. May be I'm too much of a pragmatic person, I believe pragmatism is what we need ATM and ASAP. This is also necessary to *contain* all Arabic translation efforts. Instead of being selective by raising the bar high for entrants, Arabeyes should embrace every possible translator. I wonder why we complain about not too many active members when we're being elitist. Again, the goal is not to form a group of elitists, let's drop the arrogance attitude a bit towards new comers, and move the Arabic translation train into its rails again. We're the only serious Arabic translators in the scene, it's a great *responsibility*, even religiously, if religion holds any place in you. Please understand that 99.99% of Arabic computer users out there are not as tech savvy as you are (actually, that's the reason only you survived the obstacles..), the language(English) and the terminology (IT) form a learning curve that is simply too steep for them. May be you're wondering what I'm expecting from this email. I'm expecting a revision of the whole translation process. Currently, new translators have to register to the website, read 99 manuals, subscribe to the mailing lists, get a CVS account (which means they have to be CLI masters). Remember, it's like a filter, every step in the way potentially discourages many people away. You require that level of dedication from may be core developers, or at most all developers, but not of every translator whose only interest is translating strings. After all, getting a CVS account and subs'ing to a mailing list is no guarantee for dedication, how many people have CVS accounts but are not or were never dedicated? I can hear you saying "but.... if we don't request them to do that they will not be dedicated", They don't even know how to do that, mate. Another would say: "... if we won't request that they read those 99 manuals they will bombard us with questions", to that I say, so what, let them ask, please drop the arrogant RTFM[1] attidude whenever someone asks a seemingly (to you) simple question, nobody was born a master. If somebody asks "How do you enable Arabic in windows", a bad answer would be to just give him a link to a 12 page manual, a good answer might be "You go to control panel, you do this ..etc, this is also explained here: link". We should win hearts first, if you win a heart, you win the mind. Please understand that this is not a rant, I'll put my hand first on the table to get this moving. We need to *work*, to get things *working* and to show that we actually *mean business*. Finally, after we fix our wrecked (in my opinion) translation and recruitment process, we should then think of real concrete steps to recruit more translators, I'll leave that after this discussion. Please voice your opinion even if you'll only write a couple of words. Djihed [1]read the flipping manual _______________________________________________ Doc mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/doc
