[Localization] South and Central American indigenous languages in Sugar

Tue Sep 27 08:14:32 EDT 2011

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Hernan Pachas <hernan.pachas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hola Chris.
>
> Todo  lo mencionado suena muy bien.
>
> Quisiera establecer un plan de trabajo el cual podamos seguir y de esa
> manera contribuir de forma positiva a logro de nuestras metas.
>
> Como un punto inicial, te puedo comentar lo siguiente:
>
> Estamos trabajando en generar tutoriales en video de "como realizar la
> localización" que ayuden al trabajo que realizaran los traductores
> (español-quechua) teniendo en cuenta que serán personas no ligadas a
> la tecnología, pero si con el idioma.
>
> Por otra parte, nos gustaría trabajar en la localización de imágenes
> por región. Lo explico a continuación:
> En el Perú, existen 3 Regiones: Costa. Selva y Sierra, en cada una de
> ellas por lo general encuentras flora y fauna que las caracterizan,
> por ejemplo,
> Animales en la Costa: http://clase11.galeon.com/mascotas1960738.html
> Animales en la Selva: http://clase11.galeon.com/mascotas1960727.html
> Animales en la Sierra: http://clase11.galeon.com/mascotas1960739.html
>
> Muchas veces a los habitantes de una región les es más fácil entender
> y comprender historias, relatos, sumas, restas, etc. cuando se les
> explica sobre animales/vegetación que ellos conocen.
>
> La idea es que durante el inicio de sesión, el alumno/profesor pueda
> seleccionar la región a la que pertenece y automáticamente cambien las
> imágenes de la región seleccionada.
>
> La pregunta es podemos trabajar en paralelo el cambio de imágenes y
> localización a la vez?
>
> Podríamos tener como resultado de este trabajo una localización más
> aplicable al uso del recurso. Por qué?.. imagínense que en el curso de
> matemáticas se pida a un alumno de la selva sumar elefantes, el alumno
> jamas ha visto a un elefante, ni sabe que es un elefante, pero que
> pasa si se pide al alumno sumar loros, creo que en este ejemplo el
> alumno podrá sumar y asociar con mayor facilidad dicha suma, dado que
> conoce del animal al cual hacen referencia.
>

There are lots of similar scenarios around the world; for example, in
Kenya, the math is taught with examples from farming, but in the west,
it is a fishing culture.

I am doing this to some degree with the ICanRead activity
(http://git.sugarlabs.org/icanread) where I maintain different
subdirectories based on language group for sounds and images. It is a
bit unwieldy in our current packaging system: It really needs some
sort of plugin system where you can download language-specific units
(much like the plugins for Turtle Art). Hopefully we'll get that built
into ASLO and Sugar sooner than later.

regards.

-walter
> ---hernan
>
>
> 2011/9/25 Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>:
>> 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
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org