Hi, The GNOME localisation community in India is faced with a very peculiar situation, and it would be good to arrive at a consensus on how to deal with this.
The BossLinux (http://bosslinux.in/) folk based at CDAC-Chennai have gone ahead, and translated large parts of GNOME (I believe version 2.18) into 18 Indian languages. These are available at http://downloads.bosslinux.in/Translated_Po_files/ I applaud the scale of this effort, but unfortunately there are some serious drawbacks here that make it difficult, if not impossible for this work to be integrated into GNOME: 1. I know of no attempt to contact existing language teams prior to starting on this work. This is true at least of Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Oriya. Worse yet, the language team line in the .po file header has been changed to some CDAC address, which can only lead to myriad problems down the road. 2. As CDAC made no attempt to talk to people about consistency, the translation terms used are out of sync with accepted ones that were used earlier. At least for Hindi, and now increasingly for other language, the terms that the FOSS community uses are reviewed by outsiders. 3. The translation quality is low, at least in the Oriya .po files that I saw. For example, "parent" as in "parent process" has been translated into the equivalent of "biological parent". 4. CDAC has offered these files up for the community to submit upstream, but has apparently no intentions of being involved in the process. >From what I can see, and after discussions on #indlinux, here is what I see as a possible approach: (a) For languages that are, say more than 60% complete, I see little benefit in trying to integrate these files, because of points 2, and 3 above. For Oriya, I will ask the Redhat person who now does the bulk of the work to make a judgement call. (b) For languages that have not been started, or are at a very low level, it might make more sense for people to integrate these files. However, even here there are issues, such as unsolved Unicode problems for some languages like Kashmiri. I am not sure how CDAC has done translations in spite of these. I strongly feel that good-quality translations are more important rather than just ticking off a box for having added another language, and would be against the lazy way out of just integrating these files without a review. (c) The list of CDAC language translations with existing teams: Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. There is an incipient team for Sanskrit, and no teams yet for the CDAC translations into Bodo, Konkani, and Manipuri. I suggest that existing teams take a call on trying to integrate these translations, and someone with at least a working knowledge of Bodo, Konkani, and Manipuri step forward to start teams. Would like to hear your views. Regards, Gora _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
