community – Page 3 – Petr Kovar's Trivia

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.

Czech community events

Just a follow-up to my previous post on the GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague and two notes with regard to my past and future talks on FLOSS community localization.

Registration opened for the GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague

Jiří set up a simple registration form and we ask all attendants to register. This is in particular so organizers will have some idea as to how many people can be expected for the first part of our party with talks, and also for booking the pub afterwards.

The registration form is in Czech (almost), nonetheless, but it shouldn’t be hard to submit it even if you don’t understand the language: fill in your given name and surname in the text box, then remember to tick the checkboxes below, the first one is for the first part of the party, and the second for the social event. (Yes, the Submit button and the “Required” label don’t seem to be localizable in the Google Docs interface.)

LinuxAlt 2010

I gave a talk on localization at the LinuxAlt 2010 community conference which was held in Brno, at the Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, on November 6-7, 2010. Similarly to the one at the conference in Zilina last summer, this talk was mainly about the i18n/l10n basics, translation community building within the smaller and bigger projects alike, about usual translation workflows and tools, be it on the desktop or in the cloud, translation outsourcing, crowdsourcing and other buzzwords everybody loves.

Slides and audio record are available (in Czech). There is no recorded stream for download yet.

Open Source Conference / LinuxExpo 2011

The biggest FLOSS event in the Czech Republic, at least as per attendance, will be held on April 19, 2011 in Prague, at the U Hájků Congress Center. My talk on localization has been accepted recently, but the conference schedule is not available yet.

So if you will be around Prague either on April 9 or April 19, don’t hesitate to catch me. I always appreciate a chance to meet up and talk to people who are passionate about FLOSS communities, localization and documentation. I swear I’m rather chit-chatty when it comes to these things!

GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague

In January, Jiří Eischmann started organizing the GNOME 3 Launch Party in the Czech Republic, with the obvious goal to celebrate the major release of GNOME 3, to promote and talk about the next generation of the GNOME Desktop in front of the Czech audience interested in FLOSS and technology generally.

A rather informal event in its form, organized by the Czech Translation Team, will be hosted on Saturday, April 9, 2011, at the Student Facilities in Strahov (Strahov Dormitory Campus), Block 7, Prague (Areál kolejí Strahov, blok 7, Praha 6). See Google Maps.

We will start at 15:00 with the following talks:

Tomáš Bžatek & Tomeu Vizoso: GNOME 3 from users’ and developers’ perspective
Vojtěch Trefný: Unity as an alternative way
André Klapper: Release and bug management in GNOME (in English)
Petr Kovář: Czech localization

Visitors will be offered fresh Live USB Images running GNOME 3 based on Fedora. After the conference part (around 19:00), there will be a social event/informal meeting in a near pub.

There may be some further news from organizers regarding this event, so follow the appropriate Czech GNOME 3 Launch Party page, or this blog.

Come to visit us and join the GNOME 3 fun in Prague!

Translation Teams Off

You are a developer and you want to keep your project moving forward. You set up various communication channels and organize an open community around. Your vivid project starts to attract new people, amongst them are people who intend to contribute code to the project. Great, because that’s what you were waiting for when you started building your FLOSS community.

Naturally, you do not allow anyone on the net to directly contribute code without any, more or less formal, review process. That’s good, since you care about happy community of contributing members, but you also want quality that you can be proud of.

And then there’s the world of community localization. You are most likely not a polyglot, and you can hardly do a review process with tons of languages from around the world, apart from making sure that the localization work you’ve been provided is not missing some obvious bits of technicalities. So you simply open the submit process for l10n to anyone, or reach to some nice outsourcing tool, hoping that translators will eventually cope with it and the project’s l10n will be worthy, as is the code. But really?

But Really, It’s For Your Own Good

That is, not to stick to the openness at any cost. The fact is that, quite similarly to the code contribution, the quality work in l10n will not miraculously show up. It needs reviews, proper management, suitable workflow. It needs community.

One of the first things you need to do if you want to facilitate building a real l10n community is to set up, more or less formal, rules. So you turn the translation teams option on. You encourage work in translation teams & projects, so your translators can interact with each other and share knowledge. You keep an eye on l10n. You are responsive to the needs of your translation team members. Then you are a great developer with FLOSS project that deserves quality & efficiency in l10n very much comparable to that of the professional (as in commercial) translators with plenty of ISO & DIN certificates. And your project has it. For free. (Almost.)