Hi everyone :)
I know this is early to report, but I want to take the chance while I
have it.
Due to my illness [1], our participation has fluctuated a great deal
in the past year. We had our first official release last year with
OpenOffice.org 2.1, and that started a really amazing amount of
interest in our user community.
I just wish it had the same effect on participation in our project. ;)
I have no idea how many users we have. The Vietnamese government is
switching 40,000 computers to OpenOffice.org this year, so that's a
good start.
I'm currently encouraging users to download the snapshot builds from
our project download page, rather than via bouncer, since we didn't
have a release for 2.2 or 2.3. I hope we can officially release 2.4,
but that will depend on participation.
If the builds aren't tested, we can't release them.
(I can only test on Mac OSX, which very, very few Vietnamese use, due
to its expense and the third-world economy. Pirated Windows on old
machines is the norm.)
Meanwhile, I know a lot of people are using our builds, so I keep
hoping we will get more actual participation in the mechanics of
translation, testing, release and generally being part of the main
OpenOffice.org project.
For this release, we have translated several thousand more Help
strings. One new member is hoping to involve his university staff/
students in completing the Help. (I'd have my fingers crossed, but it
messes up my typing even more than usual. ;) )
Our project resources are very few, no financial resources. We have
1-3 active members at any one time. We do keep hoping and asking for
more. Everybody wants the result but nobody wants to do the work. ;)
Our most serious Issue currently is 81728 which prevents installation
in Vietnamese on Windows computers. Although some of our users are
switching to Linux, and we hope that will increase, currently nearly
all our users use Windows. The mess with the Windows installer has
definitely lost us many users, a lot more than we care to imagine. I
have logged an issue asking that the Windows installer use the
relatively new _Unicode_ NSIS, as this would fix our problem and make
life easier for other languages, too.
Our current twin goal is to hold the project together and get 2.4
released. We also want to finish the Help and fine-tune our overall
translation with feedback from users.
Our most important achievement overall was the 2.1 release: our most
important achievement in the last year has probably been the fact that
we're still here. It really is impractical to run a NLP with 1-3
people, when often none of them are available.
Our greatest failure? We have a lot of users demanding more translated
Help, more translated documentation, bug fixes etc. Reputation is
extremely important in Vietnamese culture: OpenOffice.org's overall
reputation may well be damaged by our lack of resources, no matter how
hard we try — our inability to deliver the solid localized
infrastructure OpenOffice.org needs.
from Clytie
Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team
http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n
[1] Similar to advanced MS
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