[Olpc-Haiti] professional translation resources for OLPC/SugarLabs

[Carmina Mevs]

Awesome resource Alex.
Going through the list right now
Thanks
Carmina
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Do you speak Creole?
Haiti needs your help!
Can you Help?
www.raisehaitiup.com
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On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy at mac.com> wrote:

> Chris Leonard wrote:
> > I believe that all translations are from volunteers. Each language
> > group has the opportunity to organize itself and control the process
> > as they see fit.  For example, Nepali translations have been provided
> > by the very organized team from OLE Nepal.  A number of the languages
> > (pidgins) in Oceania share some of the challenges of Haitian Kreyol in
> > that they are not richly described as written languages and they are
> > controlled by designees from OLPC Oceania for harmonization of the
> > written forms.
> >
> > One of the beauty of open source tools like Pootle is that while they
> > are well-designed to accept input from a broad community of
> > participants, they still have significant quality control mechanisms
> > that can be employed to achieve high quality.  Differing levels of
> > privileges, review with some automated error checking to identify
> > possible problems, contributions to the Pootle server are not
> > "published" to the software repo until a language administrator
> > "commits" the particular PO file.  Of course any individual string
> > translation can be reviewed and corrected easily by changing it and
> > re-committing the PO file.
>
> Michel DeGraff writes:
>
> > Hopefully the current language administrators are certifiably competent
> > professional translators who are duly remunerated for their much needed
> > expertise and their hard work, on a par with other employees and
> > consultants working for OLPC.
>
> Unfortunately, given the financial structure of OLPC and SugarLabs (the
> latter of which actually administers the Pootle translation/localization
> system used for the XO software), I would guess that none of the current
> language administrators for the SugarLabs Pootle system are remunerated,
> and I suspect that this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
>
> That doesn't mean that there may not be professional translators or OLPC
> employees acting as administrators, just that they are unlikely to be
> getting paid for doing this.  It is more possible that some translations
> have been done (for pay) by professional translators (this may be the
> case with the Kreyòl translations Guy-Serge Pompilus reports, I don't
> know) but I would guess that these would have been delivered to the
> administrators in bulk form and incorporated with little if any review
> or modification.
>
> In most cases, the administrator's role in a Pootle
> translation/localization system involves coordination between and among
> translators and developers, along with some amount of automated
> consistency checking to handle technical (non-language-specific) issues
> with the translations.  As such, IT and software development experience
> is probably more relevant than language proficiency although of course
> both are helpful.
>
> As Chris noted, Pootle has a permissions system that can be configured
> by an administrator (again - IT experience helpful here) to give
> different users different levels of access to the translation:
> "suggestion" (noted as a comment on the current translations, for later
> review), "submission" (a change to the current translation), "review"
> (incorporating and/or deleting suggestions), and "commit" (actually
> delivering the set of translations to the software development/build
> system).  By limiting non-expert translators to suggestions, expert
> translators can review any translations before changes are made, or an
> administrator performs a commit.
>
> However, that is the theory, and in practice, most professional
> translators are much more skilled in languages than in computer
> technology - they probably already use their own preferred set of
> translation tools (this may just be Microsoft Word), and are less likely
> to be as interested in learning the moderately complex Pootle interface
> to review translations.  So the ability to effectively utilize
> professional translators (even when money is available to pay them) can
> be limited, and will often require volunteer administrators familiar
> with the Pootle system to "bridge the gap" and provide export and import
> to and from the formats the professional translators use.
>
> That said, I think that professional translators do have something to
> contribute to this effort, and what's more, in the specific context of
> Haiti there is currently some opportunity to engage them even without
> any money to lay on the table.  In particular, I would note the
> following two blog postings
>
> http://renatobeninatto.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-translation-industry-can-do-for.html
> and especially
>
> http://www.milengo.com/what-the-translation-industry-is-doing-for-haiti-relief/
> as providing a lot of information about professional translation
> resources being mobilized in support of Haiti.  Many of these, I expect,
> may have very limited ability to support Kreyòl translation, but there
> are at least some.  It certainly would make sense for this group to make
> contact with some of these others to see what joint efforts and/or
> coordination is possible.
>
> @alex
>
> --
> mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com
>
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