As this is my first blog post on blogs.gnome.org, I would like to thank GNOME administrators for providing such a nice blogging platform for the members of the GNOME community. And then, I guess, I should introduce myself. My name is Petr Kovar (Petr Kovář including diacritical marks), a Czech technical translator and technical writer living in Brno, Czech Republic.
Let me repeat some personal information that I have written on my profile on live.gnome.org: I participate in the Czech GNOME localization, and I am also active in the (Free) Translation Project and a few other internationalization and localization-related projects. Also, I am an occasional FLOSS documentation writer, and a proud GNOME Foundation member.
In the GNOME Translation Project, I am one of the Coordination Team members. As such, you can often find me trying to be of some use to the translation community that gather together on the gnome-i18n@gnome.org mailing list. As of February 2008, I also coordinate the Czech GNOME localization team. Within the Czech translation community, I help with co-maintaining the L10N.cz project which aims to provide coherent glossaries and other various Czech l10n support resources.
I joined the GNOME community as an active translator/contributor in 2007 when I felt the need to help out with the quality and, in particular, quantity of upstream localization in my language. Though I should add here that I have been a happy GNOME user since at least 2001. Oh those years! Anyway…
I have never felt urge to have my own blog (or is it webblog? It seems not, since both terms are being underlined by a default Firefox spell checker, so it must be good old web log, then). Despite my not planning, you better never say never, as they say. I have some ideas, thoughts, stories and happenings that I would like to write or comment about. That being said, I am not going to become a prolific blogger or anything, even without this blog activity, I don’t have as much free time as I would like to. But that is another story.
I guess that my posts will focus mainly on those things that relate to localization and GNOME translation community, or FLOSS translation community in general. There are some great blogs being aggregated on Planet GNOME that I have been reading for quite a time. These are e.g. blogs of Andre Klapper, Johannes Schmid, Leonardo Fontenelle, Friedel Wolff, Og Maciel, or Danilo Segan, to name a few. As I enjoyed them, I thought to myself, why not try to get in and fill in what might be still empty in the GNOME blogosphere. Well, I am about to try to compose at least a few posts, and then see whether it is sustainable for me to keep this alive or not. :-)
Thank you for naming me :)
Translators make a large part of the GNOME community, and yet have little visibility. Blogging is a great way of making the translation work more visible to the GNOME community as well as to the “outside world”.
Specifically, when I started blogging, one of my priorities was making the Brazilian GNOME translation team know the other Brazilian FLOSS translation teams and vice-versa. I believe I was reasonably successful, even if I didn’t accomplish that only through my blog.
I also missed a blog focused on the GNOME translation (or FLOSS translation at all). I don’t write about GNOME translation that much any more, but I’m quite happy about what I did.
Hi Leonardo!
If I recall correctly, it was thanks to your blog post that I became familiar with the Translate Toolkit, for example. Yes, I think that GNOME translators or FLOSS translators in general are underrepresented in the blogosphere, so we definitely need more translators blogging. ;-)