[Localization] 2012 L10n priorities

[Chris Leonard]

I wanted to sketch out a few priorities for translation projects to
consider in the coming year.

1) Completeness

There are a lot of strings still to be completed for most projects,
getting more strings submitted is a high priority.  Please try to set
aside some time in the coming year to perform some localization.
Recruiting additional localizers and even organizing a Translation
Marathon are valuable ways to contribute to the goal of more complete
localizations.

2) Quality

a) Errors:  Please use the on-line pofilter checks.  The Review tab of
Pootle shows the pofilter checks.  Not every string flagged by
pofilter is an error, but all are worth a manual review by a native
speaker.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/pofilter_tests

b) Consistency:  Please consider downloading your language's PO files
and using the poconflicts tool from the Translation Toolkit to perform
a check for consistent translation of terms.  Again, in some cases
ther are reasons for conflicts (e.g. "Delete" translated as "Borrar"
or "Eliminar" depending on context in Spanish), but it is a valuable
exercise to review the results of a poconflict and an
inverted-poconflict analysis to find strings that can be improved.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/poconflicts

3) Commits

Having the strings complete and correct in Pootle is not sufficient.
The PO files must be committed to VCS for them to be used.  This is
the responsibility of language administrators.  We call for Glucose
and Fructose commits when a release is pending, but Honey does not
follow this release schedule and language admins should eview Honey
for activities tah may be completed, but not committed.  It is good to
commit Honey PO files as soon as they are completed because you never
know when the author may make another release (containing the new
translations).  There may be some language projects in need of
language administrators and we will try to recruit them as needed.

If you do not know if the PO files for your langauge have been
committed recently, you can always check the archives here:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/pootle-commits

If you've been completing PO files and they are not being committed,
please write to the L10n list and request that your language admin
review and commit them.

4) Upstream

While getting Sugar translated is obviously our priority, it is
important to remember that Sugar is only part of the user experience.
There are many other programs with user displayed strings that are
needed for a truly complete localization in use.  We try to track
upstream packages that are used on Sugar and OLPC builds as well as
hosting upstream PO files ror efforts that contribute to Sugar and
OLPC users.  If your project is complete in Sugar, ther is still lots
of localization work that can be usefully done to enhance the
experience of users in your language by contributing to upstream L10n
projects that will flow downstream into Sugar and OLPC builds.

The current development cycle for Sugar is not creating a lot of new
UI strings (because it is focused on the GTK2 > GTK3 migration),
This represents a terrific opportunity for localization to "catch up"
to the development process.  We will be trying to add more Honey
activities to Pootle.

5) Internationalization

If there is an activity that you would like to see made available in
Pootle, please mention it to the L10n list and we will try to get the
developer ot set it up for translation.

6) New language support

There are a number of language projects in Pootle that do not yet have
glibc locales.  We need to work on getting locales created for these
so taht they can be used in Linux distros.  We should also start
thinking about what new keyboard layouts might be needed for these as
the XO-3.0 tablet should make it much easier to create new virtual
keyboards.

Any comments or questions are welcome, but most welcome of all are new
strings :-)

cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator.
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/