Hi! I'd like to give my two cents as I work in the Sun G11n. This is a long email thread and obviously an important topic to communities. I'm only one person answering the email thread, but I do believe that it is important to us (G11n) as well, and I'll try to address some questions raised in various emails here without quoting specifics.
First of all, a bit of explanation of how we (Sun G11n) operate may give some clarity to your queries around l10n work we do and time it takes to respond to translation issues. We're a centralized group responsible for translation and review, some level of i18n, and l10n testing of most of Sun's products. There are 200+ people in the organization distributed in different parts of the globe. Of this number of people, we have about 10-15 people in the organization who are linguists. There are more than one linguist for some of Asian languages (ja and zh, for example). But for the others, we have only one or less person (some are part-time). As you can imagine, most translation work is outsourced (UI, Help, docs, etc.). Our linguists -and literally most of us in G11n- work on various Sun products at any given time. So the reality is, that our time to dedicate to a product is very limited, and once a product goes out the door -or once our translation is delivered to the next chain in line-, we're working on something else. This also explains somewhat, why we've _assigned_ an individual for "all" translation issues regardless of languages. Secondly to address some points made about Sun being in control of most of SO language l10n and not involving the respective communities, we're trying to change this. The fact is that though we (OO.o leads and Sun G11n) agreed on collaboration for SO8/OO.o2.0, not all 10 communities (SO currently is localized into 10 langs.) have been able to participate. For 5 SO languages, a part of Help (namely, Basic module) is being translated and linguistically reviewed by the communities with our G11n linguists available for joint decisions. Such work began with first agreeing on glossaries and style guides. Also G11n l10n testing team has introduced our tools and test documents to the communities. We agreed on testing of m65 in December, and French and German communities have tested the product with us. Through the test tool (TCM), communities can see what test is being performed within SO G11n team. More details are available in: http://l10n.openoffice.org/localization/L10n_pilotprocess.html Discussion around the pilot process is happening in a separate mailing alias: http://l10n.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=pilotprocess All our meeting minutes and presentations are stored in: http://l10n.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=358&expandFolder=358&folderID=0 It is our hope that more communities will participate, and that the collaboration will grow. Specifically for French case that started this email thread, I'd recommend that Sophie (OO.o fr) communicate this directly with Brigitte (G11n fr) if that hasn't happened yet. Same case for the other languages where we (G11n) have internal linguists -Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Japanese-, if a wording change in the source causes a problem in their languages. German UI is set by Elizabeth who also does English source. Therefore, she's the right person to address German UI specific issues. Sorry this email is longer than I wanted it to be. Let's continue to discuss in this alias what the desirable solutions may be. Young --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
