Salam to all Arabeyes members, For what seems like ages now, there has been growing concern, and sometimes even dismay and anger, at the status of QAC, the official Arabeyes Quality Assurance Committee. This committee's activity has been stalled for months now. Originally meant as a body to ensure all linguistic-related issues of Arabeyes are taken care of, and that our translation projects can function quickly and without hinderance, now almost nothing has remained of what that committee had achieved except the concepts and abstract ideas.
Well, no more! The time has come when we wipe the dust off of QAC, and get it off the ground. Translation projects are stalled. New inexperienced translators find the things they have to learn so scattered and inconcrete that they are quickly overwhelmed. It is time for us to make sure this committee can stand on its own, with or without us. I believe that one of the main reasons for QAC's failure the last time was disorganization, and an absolute freeze in decision making. We needed to meet before we made any decisions, and there were six of us. We never did show up all at once. Every decision needed a vote and until we had enough voters decision making was just delayed, delayed, delayed and you know the results. What I have in mind now is a different management model. Instead of six members of equal weight, we will have an arbitrary number of members, between 3 and 6 maybe, plus in addition a supreme QAC uberlord, or a manager if you find that term too scary :-). Centralized decision-making == FAST PROGRESS. That manager will probably be me, but if anyone else wants to volunteer this is your chance! If you just want to volunteer to be a member of QAC, say so now please. Ayman and Arafat, you have already been drafted ;-) QAC will responsible for all translation and linguistic related tasks here on Arabeyes. I can cite a lot of examples of such tasks, but no need for that now. What I want is for Arabeyes translation teams to work like well-oiled machines, never breaking down for silly reasons that should have been taken care of a long time ago. I hope to see to it that QAC will be the translation teams' scout, removing all obstacles from their way before they reach them. We will be meeting once a week, and then after we get some actual work done, it will be once every two weeks. But we do have to get off the ground first. We will also be using wiki heavily, unless the members opt to put QAC related material on CVS instead. Either is fine with me. Our most important project will be creating the technical dictionnary. Well, guess what? I have the whole thing planned out already. Read about it here: http://www.arabeyes.org/~alarfaj/techdict_plan.html There are still a few things to work out. Nadim wrote a script to help us with this dictionary but it still has bugs in it. I would like other QAC members to try and use this script and help Nadim in ironing out the problems. You can find the script here: http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/scripts/translate/list2po.pl And the list it uses and a README file here: http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/tech_wordlist.list http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/README If your finding all this information confusing and overwhelming, dont worry, just try to familiarize yourself with the above info regarding the dictionary and I promise to answer any questions promptly. I believe thats enough QAC-related stuff for now. What I want for now is: 1. A list of membes who want to enlist 2. The times they can come to meetings And thats it! I'll ask for more stuff as I remember it... :-) This time around, QAC will make it. Thats a promise. I'm making this a top priority and I'll keep pushing this thing until it gets off the ground. Please dont let the disappointing history keep you from joining this time around. :-) Salam, and thank you all. Abdulaziz,
_______________________________________________ Doc mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/doc
