If I could make one suggestion, based on our experience in the Esperanto project -- it's very useful for the translation co-ordinator to be able to see *who* did a particular translation or who made what change and when, and for some kind of "proof-read" flag to be set when a translation has been checked. If there were also some automatic system that insisted on a comment from any user who was changing an existing translation, that would be handy too, to encourage them to explain the rationale for their proposal.
Regards,
Tim
On 5 Apr 2005, at 16:52, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
From: Aiet Kolkhi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 4 April 2005 05:33:24 BST
To: [email protected]
Subject: Integrating OOo Online Glossary Management to xy.openoffice.org
Reply-To: Aiet Kolkhi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hello,
discussing this with Louis Suarez-Potts, he recommended that I raise an issue at [EMAIL PROTECTED] regarding this.
As there are many NL projects who do not have another office suite localized to the local language and do not have a working and widespread glossary of terms, it is important that before starting the actual l10n of the modules, they agree on the glossary that will be used during l10n.
OOo already did a very good job by preparing the glossary of basic terms that are used in OOo and advising that all the l10n teams localize the glossary first and move to the next stage and start translating the actual modules later.
The problem is that not every is familiar with glossary creation/discussion and some l10n teams may not be experienced in using the Translation Memory (TM) during to aid their collaboration.
While the actual l10n of the modules is best and most effectively achieved off-line, coming up with the best glossary is mostly only available by having the local IT experts, linguists product users participate in the glossary localization, voting and discussion. All the people participating in the process (e.g. university professors) may not have the ability to download the glossary of terms, translate it and send to the coordinator, most of them will ave access to Internet and the ability to log on a website, comment on existing glossary translations, add his/her own suggestions etc.
To achieve this, many tools have been created by various NL and l10n projects/teams.
Alberto Escudero-Pascual has mentioned KiPot, a tool that was successfully used for Swahili NL project. Pootle and Webtionary are other good examples. In Georgian NL, we are also using a tool I created for Georgian glossary creation/discussion that enables registered members to approve trasnlations, suggest their versions, comment on other suggestions etc.
If we could just come up with one tool that would suit the needs of most NL projects and somehow have this tool integrated to xy.openoffice.org (as this is the best place to have all the NL and l10n related resources hosted), this would make a very big difference for languages with not so much population or with little l10n history.
Upon the completion of the glossary work, the terms could easily be converted to an acceptable format and fed to any l10n software supporting TM. As a result, all the localizations would be able to keep same glossary during the process, as well as use Computer Aided Translation (CAT) to dramatically speed up the process.
The opinions of other NL representatives could also be very useful.
Best regards,
Aiet Kolkhi
