Sugar Teams Update Report, September 2011 Name of team: Translation Team
Mission statement: As stated at: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Translation_Team The goal of the Sugar Labs Translation Team is to make Sugar available in as many languages as possible at the highest quality. We work on a number of translation related projects * Localizing the Sugar Learning Platform * Localizing Sugar Activities * Translating the Sugar Documentation (e.g. FLOSSManuals) * Translating the Sugar Labs wiki. See Translation Team/Wiki Translation. * Other translation and localization needs of Sugar Labs As a practical matter, I believe the last goal can be be interpreted to engender a broader view of the FOSS ecosystem centered around the Sugar Learning Platform (e.g. eToys, OLPC builds, upstream packages pulled into Sugar / OLPC builds, downstream efforts like Waveplace, etc.). Short Term Goals (three–six months): 1. High level of coverage of Glucose and Fructose projects for Sugar 0.94 release. 2. High level of coverage in selected langauges taregeted for OLPC 11.3.0 release 3. Improvements in i18n / L10n workflow through maintenance and enhancement of Pootle server infrastructure (i.e Pootle version upgrade) and it's interactions with version control systems (i.e. Gitorious). Medium Term Goals (6 months–one year): 1. Increase administrative efficiency and task automation (e.g. Pootle-git interactions). 2. Chris Leonard has started cross-training on infrastructure-facing tasks, but both Chris Leonard and Rafael Ortiz should recruit and train backups / replacements for both community-facing and infrastructure-facing tasks. The infrastructure-facing tasks require elevated privs and so this must be a joint recruitment with the Infrastructure Team of a trusted individual. 3. Maintain and enhance level of cross-talk between Translation Team and Release Teams (string freeze announcements, etc.). Long Term Goals (one year–three years): 1. Work on providing i18n tools and training to deployments to facilitate the sharing locally developed Sugar-based materials across deployments / languages. 2. Continuing outreach to upstreams to enhance overall coverage of the FOSS ecosystem surrounding Sugar / OLPC builds. 3. Continuous improvement of existing L10n projects through poconflict analysis, term standardization, response to feedback from learners and deployments and providng i18n / L10n feedback to developers. What does the team see as its constraints from being more successful in its Mission? What are you doing to try to resolve the constraint? 1. Recruitment of additional localizers. 2. Raising awareness within the activity and content developer community of the importance of i18n. 3. Tools for long-form content L10n are still inadequate and continuing evaluation is needed. What can Sugar Labs 'central' or the community do to help? 1. Increase L10n recruitment activities through personal or collaborative contacts. This is something to which every Sugar Labs member should contribute, but the Deployment Team (especially OLPC deployment partners) and the Local Labs have particular responsibilities for their native languages. 2. Infrastructure Team support required for Pootle upgrade. 3. Activity Team collaboration required to increase i18n of ASLO activities. 4. Bug Squad colud enhance testing of LTR and bidorectional language support. Arabic / Dari or Hebrew testers would be especially useful. 5. Design Team should keep i18n / L10n issues in mind when making choices, e.g. bolding of text is not ideal for i18n / L10n (depending on the fonts available), whereas color highlighting is language neutral. 6. There are happily a wealth of materials being developed in local languages by local deployments, unhappily very few of those materials are being upstreamed by re-basing on the most-common English i18n formats. The Education Team and Local Labs should take the lead in identifying suitable materials and advocating for i18n into a format that will work with our existing infrastructure and resources (i.e. English msgids). 7. The previous point is not anglocentrism, but rather an acknowledgement of the reality that we have a primarily lang-en to lang-XX L10n community. A similar acknowledgement of linguistic reality has caused us to develop materials and methods to facilitate re-basing on Spanish for L10n into indigienous languages. This places a particular urgency on keeping lang-es L10n current at all times to allow lang-es strings to be used as a bridge to indigenous languages. cjl _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep