-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Salam,
I have just sent the message below to the 10 persons who registered lately for an account with us. I'll send it to ~20 other people in the coming hours. It is also directed to all the persons on this list. You simply change the first sentence 'You have recently subscribed for an Arabeyes.org account' to 'You are subscribed to this mailing list' :-) Please read it thouroughly and give us a hand. Regards, ==== Salam, You have recently subscribed for an Arabeyes.org account and thus showed interest in our mandate and goals. As you know, our main goal is to provide the Arabic user with an open source system that fully supports the Arabic language. One way to achieve this is to translate the many open source projects out there, or at least the most used and the most famous of these projects. Currently we are involved in the localization of 6 projects. However, the projects that need an urgent contribution are: 1/ KDE http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=KDE 2/ GNOME http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=GNOME 3/ MandrakeLinux http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Mandrake And we might be involved in the very near future in other projects. We also translate a list of English words into Arabic, in order to provide among other things an open source English->Arabic dictionary: 4/ Wordlist http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Wordlist See also: http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=QaMoose http://qamoose.arabeyes.org/ There are only a few translators working on a regular basis on these projects. To be precise, there are no more than ~3 active translators per project. They are doing as best as they can to translate the enormous amount of untranslated messages (for example, on the GNOME project, ~20 000/50 000 messages have been translated). However, with ~10 translators working on GNOME, each one of them translating 100 messages/week, we can for example finish the GNOME project in less than 7 months (to be compared with 2 years since we started to work on the project, due to the lack of a sufficient number of active translators). Now, you may ask, is the task of translating 100 messages/week easy to do ? The answer is of course YES ! And the most important is that you can translate that great amount of messages and you'll continue to be able to volunteer in other parts, either with Arabeyes if you find something that interests you, or in any other field. How is that possible ? Simply by dedicating 20 minutes/day, 5 days/week !!! Indeed, in 20 minutes (such a short period), you can translate, in average, 20 strings. If you do that 5 days/week, you can thus do your 100 messages/week. Now you may wonder how come there are not 10 translators to do such an easy task ? We unfortunately don't have an answer for that question... There are more than 300 persons who registered for an account with Arabeyes.org and then they simply vanished. If only 10% of these people join in to translate 100 message a week, we'll finish our translation projects in a few weeks ! Which will allow us to enhance the quality of the available translated projects and eventually get involved to translate new ones. The most important thing here, is that together we can share the work and get it done faster. Now, what you must remember is that wether your interests lie in development, in artwork or in any other field, you can continue to do that. You'll simply dedicate 20 min everyday. And you'll find that the requirement to do that job are rather easy: 1/ Knowledge of Arabic and English. 2/ Less than an hour to read the documentation and get familiar with the translation tools and with CVS (if you are not already familiar with them, that is). That's all ! Is that hard ? Sure it is not. So, if you are interested, please reply as soon as possible to this email and let us know, so we can assign you a file to translate (if you wish, you can also tell us what project from the 4 enumerated above you want to contribute to). Please remember that your volunteering work is vital to the community. We are all volunteers working on our spare time in order the make the dream for a full Arabic-aware Linux distribution, a REALITY ! Salam, PS: If you will to help (which we really look forward to), you can: 1/ Read and follow the guidelines of the Translator Guide: http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/guide/translator-guide-en/ 2/ Start exercising yourself by translating this test file and sending it back to me by email: http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/translate/mandrake/Attic/krozat.pot?rev=1.1 Thank you beforehand. - -- Youcef R. Rahal Arabeyes.org http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAUKGtHDRR6Cd0eSYRArr9AJ9nkvGBhINMAVHtt2F4bw/gaYsa5QCdHDwM cOTJ6VPQYYdvhGrCL5XzSQ8= =FRMo -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer
