[Localization] good to see the Cambodians getting involved...

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:23 PM, JTD <johndenny at alumni.usc.edu> wrote:
> Edward,
>
> I do not know much about the organization of the OLPC team.  Yet have spent
> many enjoyable times with Elaine Negroponte recently in Cambodia.

Please pass our thanks to her. Without the original Cambodia project,
there might not be an OLPC XO computer.

> I introduced her to the Minister of Education and helped steer you folks in
> the right direction in terms of experts on Khmer Unicode.

Thank you very much. We are discussing the possibility of a Khmer IME
to overcome the limitations of the current Khmer keyboard for Linux.
This is in Walter Bender's area of responsibility.

> Now Mr CHEA Sok
> Hour is taking a visible role in assistance. There are many wonderful
> Cambodian people with exceptional experience in all the areas necessary to
> help the project succeed. Yet Cambodia is stuck in excessive politics -
> infighting and the such...

We have observed that fact on our Localization mailing list recently.

I notice also that the Wiki concept has not penetrated to some of the
important Cambodian Web sites--the idea of permitting members or even
casual visitors to contribute content to Web pages. So we want to
encourage Cambodians to come to http://wiki.laptop.org/ and contribute
in both English and Khmer as they see fit, and to get more used to the
idea of being able to say what they think important without having to
ask permission first. Khmer translations of key Wiki pages will be
essential. I would suggest

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/
  Cambodia
  Khmer
  Localization
  OLPC_Publications
  Constructionism

as good starting points, along with pages that they link to.

> so we need to find ways to past that and be sure
> that Cambodians get credit for Cambodian work...  credit is very important
> to volunteers as it shows that the work they have done does is not wasted...

There is no difficulty with credit in the OLPC project. Each of our
repositories and bug tracking systems maintains attributions for
contributions, in large part so that people can find out whom to talk
to in order to advance our collaborative work. We also maintain
attributions for licensing reasons, and in fact so that we can give
credit where credit is due in About pages within software, in
documents, and elsewhere. Each of these systems also maintains a
history of contributions, so that credit for earlier work remains in
place even when an item is later replaced. The Wiki history mechanism
shows who made each edit; code repositories record who checked in
code; and so on.

We expect localizers to announce themselves on the OLPC Wiki, at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle#Sign-up. You will see that I am down
as Administrator for Khmer, although I do not know the language.

 [km] — Khmer language — ភាសាខ្មែរ
A 	Edward Mokurai Cherlin 	Pootle: mokurai

I am just recruiting people to do the work, and I expect that we will
soon find somebody much better qualified to take over Khmer
localization administration from me.

> On another matter...  we have started a Joomla www.joomla.org  users group
> and wish to translate the most recent version of Joomla. You talk online
> about a translation server or something liek that called Pootle...  Is this
> a project the translators could host on Pootle?

Pootle is Free Software, part of Drupal.
http://www.wordforge.org/drupal/projects/wordforge/tools/pootle

You can get your own installation for your projects. Sayamindu may be
able to advise you. He certainly knows more about it than I do. And
there are others here who know far more about Joomla and Drupal than I
do.

I believe that the KhmerOS project uses Pootle. We have started to
talk about sharing translations between KhmerOS and OLPC.

> To this point they are
> talking about making a wiki and opening it up so various parties can
> translate openly...   I am not a localizer... no idea about that stuff...
> please do offer some suggestions..

Hooray!

> Peace
> Tim
>
>
> --
> __________________________________
> John "Tim"  Denny, Ph.D.  ICT and Education Specialist
>    Adviser to the Cambodia MoEYS on Science and Technology Education
>    Executive Director, PC4peace http://www.pc4peace.org
>    Advisory Board, Masters of Development Studies -RUPP
>    International Journal of Multicultural Education, Electronic Green
> Journal
>  http://www.avuedigitalservices.com/VR/drjtdenny
>
>   "More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of
> teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given"  Bertrand Russell

Aha! You'ne of us!

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay