Hi, let me contribute by point of view. I'm not a Slovak and a member of the Slovak team, but I'm working for a Czech company Divido as a translation coordinator. I've been translating for GNOME (Czech team) for almost 3 years. But due to my job, I know situations in many open source translation teams both in the Czech republic and Slovakia. Our company produces books about open source software and Linux distributions. One of our products is a book about Ubuntu with DVD and Ubuntu on it. Although the book is in Czech and our main market is the Czech republic we have a lot of customers in Slovakia as well. In our feedback, we received a lot of complaints about a horrible condition of GNOME translations into Slovak. Some our readers literally wrote us that they rather used English or if they didn't understand English (e.g. their parents) they rather used Czech (Slovak's quite similar to Czech). Then I started looking for reasons. Originally, Czech translations were much worse than Slovak ones. At the beginning, Slovak was even used during translating GNOME into Czech. Nowadays, the situation is totally different. The Slovak translations have been experiencing steady declining for last 10 releases (from 81%! down to 46 %). The Czech translations are currently at 100 %. First I thought it was caused by lack of translators in Slovakia, but after a bit of searching I found out that there were actually quite a lot people willing to give a hand. BTW the Slovak translation team of KDE is doing very well (there are people who stopped translating GNOME and started translating KDE [1]). Then I lookend into the Slovak GNOME team itself. As I said I have worked in several translation teams, but what I found in the Slovak one really surprised me. I'm gonna make a little comparation with the Czech team because our countries are still very similar, both open source communities blend together, and the user and volunteer base is similar. JOINING THE TEAM: In the Czech team, you just need to sign up on Vertimus and make a modul reservation. It's also recommended to send an e-mail to the mailing list to check if someone's accidentally translating it. In the Slovak team, you have to send a formal e-mail in which you have to write your real name (tell open source people about privacy...). You have to ask for moduls and many of them are not available even though no one has touched them for months. CHECKING TRANSLATIONS: In the Czech team, a translator uploads a translation and a corrector checks it. If he finds any incorrect translations he corrects them and if he thinks there are serious he provides feedback to the translator. But he doesn't return the translation! The time between uploading and submitting is about a few days, 2 weeks max. In the Slovak team, if a corrector finds a problem he returns a translation to a translator. This happens again and again until it's perfectly correct or more likely the translator gets frustrated and gives up. No surprise that there are many translations waiting to be submitted for months and I think some of them will never be submitted. ACCEPTING TRANSLATIONS: The Czech team accepts translations even from translators who, as I say, just go along. All teams I've been involved in do it. That's the spirit of FLOSS. I need to translate something and if it's done why not to provide it to someone else (to upstream in this case). It does not work like this in the Slovak team. If someone provided a translation he was told that he would become a long-term translator or there was no interest... a very picky policy from the team which has lost almost 40 % of translations in 10 last releases... and result for users? no translations. There was a case when one guy uploaded 60 % of Empathy translations. It's several hundred strings, decent work. But he was told not to upload it until he gets over 90 %. What happened? That guy got apparently frustrated and looks like the uploaded 60 % will never be submitted. The result for users? no translations.
Because people kept asking why Slovak translations were in such a bad condition I wrote an article about it on LinuxEXPRES.cz [1]. That article got a huge response. And it's interesting readings, especially commentaries by users, former and current team members etc. (the article is in Czech and the commentaries either in Czech or Slovak). I received e-mails from people and some of them suggested that another Slovak localization should be made. If those ideas are brought up it's serious. I'm not a member of the Slovak team, so I can't take part in resolving this problem. But please take it seriously. From my point of view, there is no other real solution than changing the coordinator. I have followed the development in the team for quite a long time. There have been several complaints of the coordinator. He always promised that he would do the job better or make changes, but the result is self-explanatory: almost -40 % and steady fall. Jiri Eischmann [1] http://www.linuxexpres.cz/blog/proc-je-slovenska-lokalizace-gnome-tak-spatna _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
