Hi everyone! I am one of the Swedish localizers from the EuroPython sprint. We had lots of fun and Brian has just posted a great wrap-up. It will be very interesting to follow discussions here. But first, let me just say that I definitely agree with one point Brian made: that localization work can provide insight into overall usability.
Heikki wrote: "In general I believe that localizers will be people who will be reasonably familiar with Chandler and the concepts to be able to make good translations." Fair enough. I agree in principle but disagree in practice. Yes, we would have made a better translation that way. And it is perhaps very foolish to localize an app without previous experience as a user. But it does give you a great "beginner's mind" - and the questions you have to ask ocasionally reveal real design issues. I tried Chandler about two years ago and quickly walked away. This time it's different. Early adopters (like myself) can learn Chandler by using it right now, in it's current state. Personally, I am fascinated by the concepts and underlying technology, so by now I have read up on the project and achitecture, followed various threads in mailing-lists and looked at different parts of the core code. BUT... I don't think any of that should be a requirement for localizers. During the sprint my main perspective was - and it still is - that of a naive potential user. Perhaps I should mention that I have designed and deployed collaborative workflow solutions for clients, so I am not unfamiliar with some of the basic problems. And I have done some localization work before. But I am very new to Chandler. I think we probably all agree that introducing any kind of workflow concepts to new users can be surprisingly difficult. Compared to many PIM solutions, Chandler has core concepts (like Collections and Items) that are more general and slightly different. Hopefully this is mostly an advantage - and these are not difficult concepts to understand in the abstract. But actually trying to use them is not always easy - and experience from other applications might not be relevant. Since Chandler Desktop is quite similar to other PIM applications, even small differences can be confusing. I think it is good to be very explicit about Chandler-specific concepts to help new users. :-) Or even unreasonably inexperienced translators. In practice, this has worked out just fine so far. But as Brian pointed out, there are still many things we can do to make things easier for the next localizer who comes around. // Jonas Beckman _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev
