[Localization] Translation Team Report

[Chris Leonard]

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