[Localization] [IAEP] [SLOBS] Motions to create position of Translation-Community Manager

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 5:52 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Lionel for taking time to vote your conscience even despite others
>> of us who believe we have a legal/fiduciary obligation to our biggest
>> investor (Trip Advisor) and a moral duty to the world's most disconnected
>> children.
>
>
>
> Lionel - FYI in the past, I positioned Sugar as an aid to protect & promote
> minority/indigenous languages; doing what the for-profits would never do. A
> key differentiator. The idea was to say that Sugar was translation-ready for
> any language, and that a digital experience could be offered to children in
> support of a minority language.

When standing for SLOBs candidacy in 2013, I posted this statement:
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Cjl/Candidate_Statement

Perhaps my achievements measured against such lofty goals have been
modest, but I remain committed to the same principles I articulated
several years ago.  I'm proud of the work I've done and look forward
to doing more.  I learned a lot about the upstream requirements for
language support and earned a role as a committer in the glibc project
(not the easiest community in the world to join), but a key chokepoint
for getting a language represented in any Linux distro.

> Of course, the reality can be quite different. Many parents and teachers
> associate IT with majority languages (en/es/fr), and see IT as an excellent
> opportunity for children to learn those useful languages. The Madagascar
> deployment is a case in point.

The argument that I would generally make in favor of L10n into
indigenous languages in spite of locally preferred
languages-of-instruction has been the opportunity of out-of-school
usage by family members of a personally-deployed XO laptop.  That is
not always the case for school-captive laptops, but I also believe in
the potential of Sugar to reach people though SOAS and distro packages
where language conservation is a community goal.  Our Maori and
Papiamento work are several such examples.

Tony has clearly spoken of the importance of that funded L10n projects
have clear plan to land in user's hands, in which I concur.  This gets
back to the age-old "feedback from deployments" question that has
dogged Sugar from Day One, to which I can not claim a magic solution,
but past experience has shown that L10n support can be a "foot in the
door" to deployment coordinators (e.g. Armenian, OLPC Mexico
languages, etc.).

> If a clear vision and roadmap can be agreed upon, there can be ample
> requests for resources in support of marketing (teachers) or recruitment
> (developers) or fundraising (donors), and I maintain that translations
> should be a central pillar of those initiatives. The EU for example has many
> projects in support of its 60 minority languages [1]: "decision-making in
> this field [language policy] also falls to education providers, ..."
>
> Sean
>
> 1.
> http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/regional-minority-languages_en.htm
>
>
>
>
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