December 2011 – Petr Kovar's Trivia

Brno Doc Sprint Update

If you are contributing to GNOME documentation, probably you already read about the Brno Doc Sprint (and the Developer Conference) that takes place in Brno, February 17-21, 2012, at the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University (from February 17-18) and at the Red Hat Czech Office (from February 19-21).

For those of you attending this documentation event, the organizers have special arrangements with one of the hotels near both doc sprint venues to provide the attendees a discounted rate. See the Developer Conference wiki page for more details.

To be able to receive the discounted rate, please confirm your attendance by January 9, 2012 on the doc sprint wiki page.

Please also remember to fill in your arrival and depart dates, and, since the special rate is for double-bed rooms, your roommate.

See you all in Brno!

Czech translations and Google Code-in 2011

This year, the GNOME Czech Translation Team officially participates in the Google Code-in program for pre-university students ages 13-18. I joined the GNOME mentors group and submitted four tasks so that students can help our team with updating GNOME 3.4 translations for gnome-system-monitor and seahorse’s UI, and brasero and file-roller’s documentation.

The full announcement in Czech was posted to the Czech translation team mailing list.

Great news is that one of the tasks has been already claimed by a student. But if you know anybody interested and suitable to participate in the program, or if you’re a Czech-speaking student yourself, don’t hesitate and claim your task today! Just keep in mind that all works stop on January 16, 2012.

From looking at the list of tasks submitted for the GNOME Project, it’s very pleasing to see that there are several GNOME translation teams also taking part in the program, besides other, perhaps more usual tasks oriented on coding, documentation, etc.

Big thanks goes to our Czech teammate André Klapper for providing me with some useful information and, above all, for coordinating the whole effort from the GNOME end.

And, obviously, big thanks to Google for organizing this program.

Mission Statement

This mission statement I like and I think you will like it too. Not just because, as they put it, their mission is to consistently conjugate through dynamism, surrealism and semanticism in order to further their goals of hysterical servlet hypotenae.

Well written guys, keep it up! Now let’s all do our part and revolve vertically and evolve dynamically.

GNOME Localization Update for Q3 2011

During Q3, GNOME localization teams efforts were focused mainly on delivering translation support for the GNOME 3.2 release, which was shipped on September 28. In this release, there were more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated, including the user and administration guides.

One of the participants in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women that took place from May 23 to August 22, Priscilla Mahlangu, completed the first localization intern in the history of the program after working on Zulu translations with Friedel Wolff as her mentor. As a result, she managed to improve Zulu localization from ca. 4 percent of translated strings to ca. 10 percent.

As the first team ever, the Spanish team was able to complete the translation of the official GIMP documentation, thanks to the work done by a Spanish translator, Ignacio AntI.

Thanks to the contributions from Claude Paroz and Gil Forcada, the GNOME localization platform Damned Lies, running on l10n.gnome.org, saw a number of improvements in this quarter, including work on implementing support for word statistics.