[Localization] South and Central American indigenous languages in Sugar

[Chris Leonard]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Aleksey Lim
<alsroot at activitycentral.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 10:06:47AM -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
>>
>> Not yet available, but planned:
>> GCompris:
>> http://l10n.gnome.org/vertimus/gcompris/master/po/es
>>
>> When the Spanish localization of GCompris is completed, Sugar Labs
>> will host a temporary local copy for translation into the Quechua
>> languages or other indigenous languages not present upstream in the
>> Gnome project.
>
> gcompris is now in Honey/Templates and .po might be revealead from
> "Update from templates/rescan the project files" for langs where it
> makes sense.

All,

I would like to offer some important information about GCompris, and
ask localizers to wait a few days before working on it so that we can
make sure we are handling it in the most correct and efficient manner.

The primary GCompris L10n is hosted by Gnome on their Damned Lies server:

http://l10n.gnome.org/module/gcompris/

A great many of the languages we host are in very good shape in the
upstream and we would obtain out L10n bits from the Gnome system
through packages built and present in downstream distro repos like
Fdora, so it is a distinct possibility that not additional work may be
needed for your language.  If your language exists in the Gnome
project, GCompris localization should be done Gnome's usual process.

We have been encouraging this type of work by going upstream for some time:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Translation_Team/Pootle_Projects#GCompris

I would like to make a special request to  our Spanish localizers to
finish off the localization hosted here, so that we can use Spansih as
a bridging language for Quechua L10n:

http://l10n.gnome.org/vertimus/gcompris/master/po/es

The primary motivation for keeping a local copy of GCompris came from
a request from Peru that they would like to localize them in their
indigenous languages (e.g. Quechua).  Unfortunately no language
project for Quechua exists in Gnome and one of the requirements for
establishing a new language in Gnome is that you should submit a few
completed PO files.  It is a bit of a Catch-22, they will not set up
the localization hosting until you have done some localization.

We've proposed to Peru to resolve this by hosting a local copy of
GCompris for translation in Quechua and submission to the upstream as
part of creating an upstream Quechua language project, at which point
we would probably not continue to host GCompris for Quechua, because
we do not want to create a situation of confusion about where the
primary hosting of GCompis lives and the possibility of duplicate
effort on a language.  All of us want to avoid that.

Aleksey is the maintainer of GCompris packages for Sugar and it may be
that he has made changes to adapt GCompris games to Sugar, in which
case, there may be new strings that we would want to localize, but
this needs to be explored.  I will discuss this with Aleksey.

I would like to revisit the placement of GCompris in the Honey
project, perhaps instead creating a special project just for GCompris
to keep it separate from the rest of Honey and focused only on
languages that do not exist in the Gnome upstream [Quechua, Huastec
(Téenek), etc.]

I apologize if this all sounds a little confusing.  We always try to
work as closely as we can with upstream projects (including their
chosen primary L10n system), but we also try to be very responsive to
the unique needs of the Sugar Labs . OLPC language communities that
are not necessarily well represented in the upstream.  Sometimes this
takes a little finesse to manage, and I think in this case, we can
come up with a slightly more elegant solution than hosting in Honey
(where it will end up in all languages, even those already complete in
the upstream).

I will work with Aleksey to optimize our approach.  As I mentioned in
an earlier message Aleksey has been providing amazing support to the
Translation Team in fixing many of our infrastructure issues and his
contributions have been and will continue to be extremely valuable.

Regards,

cjl