[Localization] How do we manage translation effort in Release, process/roadmap?

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 4:58 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Sayamindu,
>>
>> Great work, thanks for taking up the gauntlet on this!
>>
>> One question for you, how much lead time do you need to do the translations?
>>
>> Assuming something like "final test" starts 15 days before the target
>> release date, when do we need to tell the developers to "freeze" all of
>> their strings?
>
> We are nowhere near that state. That would be OK if we had enough
> localizers working full-time from a previous release that was
> completely localized. In the present state of things we have no way to
> complete localization in most languages, no matter how much lead time
> we specify.
>

Not true always :-).
For example, take a look at the GNOME stats. They have a significant
number of languages breaching the 80% mark (and gaining "supported
status") for each release cycle. They have a much larger volunteer
pool though (I think..), and there are people who are actually paid to
do the translations (not by GNOME, but usually by distro manufacturers
who ship GNOME). However, I see no reason why there should not be a
similar release policy for OLPC.

> The range on our Pootle server is from 0% translated (Aymara, for
> example) to 99% for German. Spanish, the most used, is at 69%, but
> almost all of what is missing is in Etoys internals.
>
> We could pick a few languages that are in deployments and are close
> enough to finished for this sort of freeze to be meaningful. My
> impression as that that would consist of Spanish and French. I invite
> you to examine http://dev.laptop.org/translate and draw your own
> conclusions.
>

Freeze applies to code (developers need to maintain the freeze), and
not translations or translation teams individually. If we look at the
stats for XO core and XO Bundled (at least parts of which are string
frozen right now) - we have at least 10-15 languages which have
crossed the 90% percent mark. Which is not too bad.

> It would be helpful if we could get a page generated automatically
> with some statistics on language projects, but I don't know who could
> create it. Sayamindu is rather overwhelmed.
>

What kind of statistics are you looking at ? Translation stats for all
languages will probably appear in a future release of Pootle (the
Mozilla folks are working on that).

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]