[OLPC-Philippines] Sugar Labs: Translation System

[Jerome Gotangco]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Joanne Javier <jonijavier at gmail.com> wrote:
> My name's Joanne. I'm new here. I heard of the OLPC project a long time ago,
> but I didn't think there would be an OLPC project in the Philippines.
> Anyway, I'm trying to help out with the translation via Sugar Labs. I'm not
> based in the Philippines, but I'd like to meet the people who pioneered this
> project (in the Phil).

Hi Joanne, glad to know that you are interested into localization of
Sugar. As you notice in http://translate.sugarlabs.org/fil/index.html
yes its 2% done, but if you check further, Etoys has 27,435 strings
while majority of the packages do not even go beyond 1000 strings. So
that 2% is already big if you exclude Etoys which is a separate
project by itself (but still important nonetheless).

I currently have admin rights in Pootle for FIL and plan to have TL as
an alias to FIL. This is an ISO 639 thing that also affects upstream
projects that package Sugar so translations to Pootle do go to other
Linux distributions packaging Sugar (which is great).


> I hope we can also translate to other dialects as well. (But I can only
> speak Tagalog, but wouldn't it be better if we could reach out to the other
> regions as well.)

Let's be clear on our terminologies. In 1987, Filipino became the
official language of the Republic of the Philippines by virtue of the
constitution in article XIV section 6 and 7. Therefore, all evolving
words fall under Filipino. That is not to say that Tagalog is not a
language anymore. It actually is recognized as a separate language
that is region-centric (ISO 639-1 while FIL is ISO 639-2/639-3). Since
there is practically very little difference between the two, it makes
sense to merge or do an alias to both languages even in practical
terms (academics might differ on this opinion though because the
Tagalog and Filipino alphabets are different in some ways - if you
were educated in the Philippines in the 70s and 80s, you would
recognize the differences).

My approach to this is quite simple. Do a single pass for FIL, review,
commit changes and it goes back to the same review cycle until
refined. An aliased TL will adopt all changes in FIL.

Once this is done with a good review/commit/release cycle in place, it
can be applied to other regional languages like Cebuano, Bikol,
Tausug, Maranao, etc. since a lot of terminologies will spillover to
the other languages.

Dialects are a different case. In Tagalog, it is recognized as a
language, but Tagalog itself has many dialects such as those in
Batangas, Quezon, etc. so there's not much incentive to do dialects
but that would depend on our target users  (same treatment with
regional languages).


> I'm trying to get some help from some Filipino teachers who are very active
> online.

That would be great, although I would suggest to also see how Sugar
works either in an OLPC XO-1 laptop or via Sugar on a Stick that way
you will get to recognize the strings and how it is used in context.
I've seen a lot of translation projects fail because the translation
is done word for word rather than the meaning of the sentences/phrases
to be localized.

My belief is that a project like Sugar is much more approachable for
localization because of of its specialized nature and can be easily
improved in a faster pace rather than a full blow system like the
various Linux distributions out there because of the sheer number of
packages and strings to be localized.

So once people who would like to participate are familiar with Sugar,
it becomes a much easier task.

-- 
Cheers,

Jerome G.
http://www.google.com/profiles/jgotangco