<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Adam Holt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:holt@laptop.org">holt@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Clarifying Question: is it true that all OLPC/Sugar translation has been completed by 600+ volunteers to date? That was my impression, but I could be wrong,<br><font color="#888888">
--Adam<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Open source and community driven does not equate to uncontrolled and low quality. It is simply a different path to quality than a highly controlled centralized top-down approach.<br><br>cjl<br><br>