translation team – Petr Kovar's Trivia

GUADEC 2013 in Brno

Today was the last conference day of GUADEC 2013 and I have to say that being involved in the conference organization and volunteering has been an amazing experience. I want to thank my fellow organizers, our volunteers and all the people who offered their help to make GUADEC in Brno happen. You were great!

This year’s program included a number of talks related to community outreach and documentation. On Thursday, Kat and Sindhu talked about how to get involved in community efforts such as the GNOME Docs. At the Newcomers Workshop organized by Marina and others, I had a chance to meet our newest member of the Czech localization team. Our team, just like pretty much any other, needs fresh blood, so I was more that happy to see so many newcomers attending GUADEC, including those who are also interested in other aspects of the project than just coding.

At the GNOME Foundation AGM on Friday, Sindhu gave an update on GNOME documentation and I talked about what GNOME Localization has been up to since the last GUADEC in A Coruna.

Kat gave a talk on documentation on the third day. Later that day, we had a lightning talk session and I talked a bit about Getting Started video tutorials that we introduced in GNOME 3.8. Today, Marta gave a presentation on the developer tutorial for GTK+, followed by Jeff Fortin who gave a talk on PiTiVi and showed us some really funny videos.

It’s probably needless to say that conferences like GUADEC are special in that you can finally meet in person other members of the teams that you are involved in. Seeing familiar and new faces is always nice.

Next week

Next week we plan to have a docs hackfest, which will be focusing on the GNOME Desktop System Administration Guide. GNOME translators also plan to discuss some hot topics in GNOME i18n, such as broken translations for the gnome.org website, a l10n workflow for translating Git submodules, auto-committing translation files to GNOME Git repos etc. One of the outstanding issues we had appears to be already fixed – big kudos to Matthias for that.

If you are interested in GNOME docs or l10n, be sure to join us for the shared docs & l10n session we will have on the morning of the 6th. So, see you next week!

Translation BoF at GUADEC: Pictures

Gil, Andre and Rūdolfs already blogged about Monday’s Translation BoF / meeting at GUADEC 2012. We had quite a few items on our agenda list to discuss as you can see from the output of our brainstorming session on this wiki page put together by Gil.

Around ten people attended the meeting, with a (not so) surprisingly strong presence of Galician translators. All in all, this was an excellent opportunity to meet other GNOME translators in person after we have been working together on the same translation project for several years.

Enough said, let’s have a look at some pictures now.

Pictures taken by Florian – thanks!

And big thanks to the GUADEC 2012 organizers who really did an excellent job! They surely set high standards for the GUADECs to follow. So, see you in Brno or Stuttgart next year! ;-)

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.

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.)