[Localization] Translations not implemented in the field

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi Clytie,
I'm really sorry about this. I can see two ways in which this may have happened.

1. The machines have been obtained from the American G1G1 set, or the
contributor programme set. This means that the locale in the firmware
level is set to en_US.UTF-8. Normally, for other deployments, machines
are customized in the factory for the region they are being sent to
(there are a number of flags/variables in the firmware which needs to
be set for the right locale and keyboard settings). Most of the
documentation are for deployments like these, so I guess the right
information was not found :-). To fix this, one needs to start the
control panel in Sugar and choose the correct language

2. The machines do not have the translations installed. This is pretty
easy to workaround - you need to install a language pack. That is as
simple as running
http://people.sugarlabs.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/8.2/vi_lang_pack_v2.sh

All that said, I think we need to make this easier, and I have started
to code features in Sugar which will make this easier and somewhat
automated (think of Firefox language packs).

In these situation, I would ask all deployment teams, whether big or
small, whether "official" or "non-official" to file bugs if they need
any feature, or find something which they think is not right :-)

Thanks,
Sauamindu


On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Clytie Siddall <clytie at riverland.net.au> wrote:
> Hi everyone :)
>
> I've been corresponding with some of the staff of OLPC Vietnam. They put in a lot of effort, and I'm grateful for what they do to help kids learn.
>
> However, I've had some odd responses from these contacts. First, an OLPC project teacher in Saigon told me she had no idea the XO could input or display Vietnamese (see my previous post: "Language input on XO"). Now I hear from an OLPC project managet in the North:
>
>>  I had no idea these translations existed. There is definitely a communications gap between Sugarlabs and the OLPC volunteer community, especially when the volunteers are from a non-technical background like I am.
>
> "these translations" are the Vietnamese translations of Sugar etc., the very ones I have spent so many hours creating.
>
> WTF?
>
> Localizations should be implemented before deployment of the XOs, or at the very least, project staff should have an instruction sheet showing how to enable and use existing localizations.
>
> I hate to say it, but how much of our work isn't getting used out there?
>
> And what can we do about it?
>
> from Clytie
>
> Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team
>
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-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]