Tag: Quarterly Report

During Q2 2012, the GNOME translation teams mainly focused on the GNOME 3.4.x minor releases. Some teams also started working on the next major release 3.6 due in September.

In April 2012, there were 1397 translation commits to git.gnome.org as per the GNOME Commit-Digest. In May 2012, there were 1138 translation commits, and in June 2012, there were 1203 translation commits.

Some other interesting stats on the l10n.gnome.org localization platform include:

• 131 registered teams,
• 177 registered languages and language variants,
• 353 registered software modules,
• ca. 40700 UI strings for translation in the GNOME 3.4 release set,
• ca. 23100 doc strings for translation in the GNOME 3.4 release set,
• ca. 532000 UI strings for translation in all registered modules,
• ca. 268300 doc strings for translation in all registered modules.

Note that these numbers are based on the current state (October) as there is no easy way to track the past quarter in our l10n platform.

During Q2, the gtranslator PO editor also saw some improvements in translation memory management, plural forms handling, etc.

During Q1 2012, GNOME translation teams worked on the GNOME 3.4 localization. The GNOME 3.4.0 stable release was delivered on March 28. According to the GNOME 3.4 Release Notes, GNOME 3.4.0 offers support for more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated, including documentation for many languages.

When comparing the completeness of the GNOME 3.2 and 3.4 localization, the following translation teams, among others, achieved some impressive progress:

• Khmer team increased the translation completeness by 23%.
• Macedonian team increased the translation completeness by 21%.
• Canadian English team increased the translation completeness by 13%.

In January 2012, there were 1139 translation commits to git.gnome.org as per the GNOME Commit-Digest. In February 2012, there were 1483 translation commits, and in March 2012, there were 3283 translation commits suggesting that many translators were finishing their work on GNOME 3.4 during the string freeze period, which started on March 5.

Some of the other interesting stats on the l10n.gnome.org localization platform include:

• 128 registered teams.
• 178 registered languages and language variants.
• 349 registered software modules.
• ca. 41000 UI strings for translation in the GNOME 3.4 release set.
• ca. 21904 doc strings for translation in the GNOME 3.4 release set.
• ca. 500800 UI strings for translation in all registered modules.
• ca. 253900 doc strings for translation in all registered modules.

The gtranslator team released several versions of the gtranslator translation editor during Q1 2012. The new versions introduce a number of feature enhancements, including support for non-UTF-8 files, more integration with the GNOME 3 platform, and better translation memory support.

Totally forgot to post the report here, so doing it now.

During Q4 2011, GNOME language teams worked on translating GNOME apps and docs into tens of supported languages in the stable GNOME 3.2.x and the development GNOME 3.3.x branches.

Several GNOME language teams participated in the Google Code-in 2011 program. This program is for 13-17 year old high school students working on a number of tasks related to localization, documentation, development, and other areas of interest. The program ran from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012.

Two GNOME language teams took part in the 2011 GNOME Women Outreach Program, the Belarus team with Kasia Bondarava (kasia) as the intern and Ihar Hrachyshka as her mentor, and the Xhosa team with Andiswa Mvanyashe (andiswa) as the intern and Friedel Wolff as her mentor. The Outreach Program ran from September 16, 2011 to March 12, 2012.

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.

During Q2 2011 GNOME localization teams continued their work on adding and updating translations for the modules that are hosted at GNOME and make use of the GNOME i18n infrastructure.

Claude Paroz worked with Shaun McCance on a new help build system which is based on ITS Tool and is supposed to replace the currently used xml2po utility in the near future.

Furthermore, with the necessary support from the GNOME Documentation Project, GNOME translators started their work on translating the new GNOME User Documentation that was written in Mallard and is using the new help build system.

Also in this quarter, as part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships, Priscilla Mahlangu began her work on the Zulu localization of the GNOME Desktop with Friedel Wolff as her mentor.

During this quarter, GNOME translation teams worked on delivering localization support for GNOME 3, which was released on April 4 with more than 50 fully supported languages. In comparison to previous development cycles, the road to the GNOME 3.0.0 release was marked with many string freeze breaks that occurred very late in the cycle so that translation teams had to put extra effort into delivering high quality GNOME translations.

GNOME translators also worked on localization support for additional marketing resources related to GNOME 3, including the gnome3.org website.

In preparation for the 3.0.0 release, there was a module set reorganization done in Damned Lies’ GNOME 3.0 release set in order to better match the gnome-3.0 module set as maintained in JHBuild. Possible ways on how to further improve the GNOME modules representation in Damned Lies were discussed in the gnome-i18n mailing list.

Also, a new functionality was introduced to Damned Lies in that the service now offers translators the so called reduced PO files; these files do not include strings that are rarely visible to (end) users, such as “gschema.xml.in” strings, making it easier for translation teams with limited manpower to translate the GNOME modules.

Just a word of preface to fellow quarterly report writers: we still lack ca. 8 reports, so if you haven’t submit your update yet, now is the right time to do so. The deadline was postponed to February 4, 2011.

On October 16, Gil Forcada presented results of the GNOME I18N Survey which was referred to in the previous report. A brief analysis of the results was included.

Discussion on the possibility and feasibility of translating schema files within separated gettext domains or catalogs emerged from the survey analysis debate, as well as the point of localizing certain types of strings that are usually not user-visible. Especially the price of splitting limited resources within smaller translation teams was compared with the eventual need to make significant changes to the current GNOME i18n infrastructure and also to various module build systems.

With regard to the Release Team’s second proposal for moduleset reorganization from October 7, which would allow various software projects outside of the GNOME infrastructure to become officially endorsed GNOME software, members of the GNOME Translation Project expressed strong preference for working on l10n support within the GNOME official i18n and SCM infrastructure.

In the debate which spread over the gnome-18n and desktop-devel-list groups, GNOME translators were mainly concerned about translation quality, string freeze periods and release schedules, about expecting developers or maintainers to integrate translations manually to their respective repositories in a suitable, timely manner, and generally about changing the current module requirements by dropping them and/or making them optional for official GNOME software and GNOME developers.

Several proposals were made to (require to) allow the DL infrastructure on l10n.gnome.org auto-commit translations to code repositories not hosted on git.gnome.org, to migrate from the DL application altogether and replace it with Transifex, and generally to specify l10n requirements for official modules more narrowly and precisely. No final resolution was made in this regard.

Sysadmin work on DL auto-commit, providing translators a way to manage l10n support without interacting with Git system directly, was resumed during October and November. Furthermore, GTP members discussed options to integrate automatic QA checking with l10n.gnome.org.

There were also changes in coordination of the Persian and Romanian team in October and November, respectively.

(As drafted on the gnome-i18n mailing list several days ago.)

On July 29, Andre Klapper represented the GNOME Translation Project at the AGM meeting at GUADEC with a Project update report. At GUADEC, he also gave a talk on “Identifying software projects and translation teams in need” where he provided an overview of interesting data combined & gathered from Damned Lies, GNOME Bugzilla and other relevant sources.

Gil Forcada, with the feedback from other community members, conducted the GNOME I18N Survey by sending a questionnaire on August 13 to every GTP language coordinator, and collecting answers for two weeks. Out of 120 coordinators, 36 answered. The rationale behind the survey was to know each other within the GNOME translation community better, and thus to find ways the GTP can improve the overall experience of translating GNOME.

The sent questionnaire consisted of more than 20 questions on various areas of community l10n in GNOME, e.g. inquiring about general team information, coordinatorship & membership, team workflow, QA processes, use & evaluation of GNOME Damned Lies infrastructure, collaborating with downstream translators, other translation teams, and language institutions, community knowledge sharing, etc.

As for the GNOME development itself, GTP language teams have been busy working on providing l10n support for the new GNOME stable release 2.32, which was delivered on September 29. GTP has been also investigating approaches to help out language teams that seemed to be considerably short on manpower and/or proper coordinatorship, this included the Persian and Welsh teams.

We also communicated with GNOME developers to try to solve i18n issues with translating strings within submodules, strings with constructed sentences, and some other problems that (re)appeared during the Q3 period.

During Q4, apart from working on l10n support for the upcoming GNOME 3, GTP community aims for identifying issues with the current i18n & l10n infrastructure inside and outside the GNOME Project, like the Git commit functionality, and solving them, hopefully implementing the necessary GTP support for repositories hosted at git.gnome.org and elsewhere. This is to be done in conjunction with the Release Team’s proposal for moduleset reorganization.