Category: Localization

Back from GUADEC, held in the beautiful Andalusian city of Almería, Spain, from 6th July through 11th July, 2018, I wanted to share a few notes wrt documentation and localization activities at the conference and during the traditional post-conference hacking days.

Mike Hill and Rudolfs Mazurs already blogged about their reflections of GUADEC. I’d add that we had some i18n and L10n-related talks in the schedule (machine translations, input methods), which was a nice improvement in terms of representation from previous years.

The space available for the Birds of a Feather sessions this year was rather limited, so we could only secure an afternoon slot (thanks Kat!) for our docs+translators meetup. We were joined for a while by a group of local documentation writers creating Spanish manuals for the local market. After that, we focused on two main areas.

One was related to the recent migration of GNOME projects to GitLab and involved looking into usability of our wiki docs for contributors and, specifically, newcomers. We found quite a few outdated references to git.gnome.org, Bugzilla and the like, with the biggest issue, however, being the suboptimal overall structure of the contributor guides on the wiki. We also looked into how to improve submitting user feedback and switching languages for the users of help.gnome.org (and yelp).

The other area discussed was making our CI checks for GNOME documentation modules much more robust, with the idea of using the GitLab CI integration to its full potential with tests verifying translations and more.

You can find all notes from the meetup in our Etherpad.

There was also some continued discussion on reworking the GNOME developer center, but I couldn’t take part in its final installment on Wednesday, as I was already flying out.

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for their continued support in funding my travel.

With GUADEC 2017 and the unconference days over, I wanted to share a few conference and post-conference notes with a broader audience.

First of all, as others have reported, at this year’s GUADEC, it was great to see an actual increase in numbers of attendees compared to previous years. This shows us that 20 years later, the community as a whole is still healthy and doing well.

While the Manchester weather was quite challenging, the conference was well-organized and I believe we all had a lot of fun both at the conference venue and at social events, especially at the awesome GNOME 20th Birthday Party. Kudos to all who made this happen!

As I reported at the GNOME Foundation AGM, the docs team has been slightly more quiet recently than in the past and we would like to reverse this trend going forward.

• We held a shared docs and translation session for newcomers and regulars alike on the first two days of the post-GUADEC unconference. I was happy to see new faces showing up as well as having a chance to work a bit with long-time contributors. Special thanks goes to Kat for managing the docs-feedback mailing list queue, and Andre for a much needed docs bug triage.

  

• Shaun worked on a new publishing system for help.gnome.org that could replace the current library-web scripts requiring release tarballs to get the content updated. The new platform would be a Pintail-based website with (almost) live content updates.
• Localization-wise, there was some discussion around language packs, L10n data installation and initial-setup, spearheaded by Jens Petersen. While in gnome-getting-started-docs, we continue to replace size-heavy tutorial video files with lightweight SVG files, there is still a lot of other locale data left that we should aim to install on the user’s machine automatically when we know the user’s locale preference, though this is not quite what the user’s experience looks like nowadays. Support for that is something that I believe will require more input from PackageKit folks as well as from downstream installer developers.
• The docs team also announced a change of leadership, with Kat passing the team leadership to me at GUADEC.
• In other news, I announced a docs string freeze pilot that we plan to run post-GNOME 3.26.0 to allow translators more time to complete user docs translations. Details were posted to the gnome-doc-list and gnome-i18n mailing list. Depending on the community feedback we receive, we may run the program again in the next development cycle.
• The docs team also had to cancel the planned Open Help Conference Docs Sprint due to most core members being unavailable around that time. We’ll try to find a better time for a docs team meetup some time later this year or early 2018. Let me know if you want to attend, the docs sprints are open to everybody interested in GNOME documentation, upstream or downstream.

Last but not least, I’d like to say thank you to the GNOME Foundation and the Travel Committee for their continuous support, for sponsoring me again this year.

At this year’s GUADEC, there will be a number of sessions relevant to people interested in GNOME localization and documentation:

• On Monday, Kat will give an update from the docs team called Documentation: state of the union. Her talk will detail what has happened in the documentation realm since GUADEC 2013, so be sure to attend.
• Team Reports on Saturday will include localization and documentation.
• There will be a screenshot automation BoF on July 30th. Vadim Rutkovsky from Red Hat’s Desktop QE has some sweet surprise for you, translators!
• Finally, on July 30th and 3Ist, Daiki Ueno and Alexandre Franke are planning to organize an i18n hackfest to work on translation tools, spellcheckers, dictionaries, input methods, and related fields.

I’ll be arriving tomorrow evening with Christian Schaller and other desktop people from Red Hat Czech and leaving on the 31st – hope to see you all in Strasbourg!