Honestly, today I could spit chips! [1]
I already believe that the complexity and incredible inconsistency of
i18n project procedures limits participation critically. I myself
spend far too much of my scarce effective time, trying to learn these
procedures, and carrying them oụt, instead of actually translating.
And today I have a really frustrating example of how they discourage
participation.
One young man approached me last year about translation, encouraged
to participate. He and I arranged for him to join the TP, where he
did some excellent work, and he also submitted some equally good
files to Debian via me. A friend of his then also joined the TP, and
did some good work.
He was encouraged by this progress, and decided, with his friend, to
revitalize the KDE-vi team, which has been moribund for quite some
time. I was really delighted about that, and was determined to keep
in the background, to help by translating files, but to give them
room to run their own project. (This is even more important in our
culture, where an older or more experienced person has automatic
precedence: I didn't want to get in their way.)
They had done well, their confidence had risen, and they wanted to
make a difference. Great!
I watched some of the setup on kde-i18n and kde-vi: things were moving.
The university holidays intervened, then after the holidays, when
these two young people didn't contact me again, I waited a while,
then contacted them. Did they have time to contribute, this semester?
Um, no, they were too busy.
I should have caught on then, because "too busy" is one of our
default set of polite excuses, used when we can't say "No", because
saying No is impolite, particularly towards anyone senior.
Interestingly, this young man contacted me this week and said he'd
started translating some files for the Xfce project, and could I help
him with svn, by checking out the files? I asked him for addresses
and procedure, and he sent me the URLs. He also asked on the VNOSS
list, and a friend came to his aid while I was still working it out. ;)
I then picked up a very old bug on Debian, which asked why kde-vi had
been dead for so long, and I decided I could ask him if he was
planning to continue with kde-vi, since he was evidently active with
Xfce.
The punchline to this (sorry) long description: he had had to give up
on KDE-vi, because he couldn't understand the procedure, nor the
complex messages on the kde-i18n mailing list.
:(
This really s*cks: a young person who does excellent translations,
motivated to help his community, giving up because of the
difficulties of understanding i18n project procedures.
I've offered to help with kde-vi, and I hope we can work it out, but
I'm really frustrated when I see volunteers discouraged like this.
i18n project procedures surround each project like a forest of barbed
wire, instead of being the pathway in.
The Pootle roadmap, I hope, is that pathway.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
[1] Idiom meaning "I'm so angry!"
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