Fedora and Translation Teams

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Mohammad,

Will all my respect for you and the Arabeyes project, but this
thread is getting more and more frustrating.  First Yousef starts
bombarding the list about what he has been misunderstanding for a
very long time, and then you show up and keep doing the same
thing.

I think it's important to understand that you are contributing to
the Fedora project, and you *have to* play with their rules.
It's not important to most of the people here that what is
Arabeyes or how does it manage its tasks.

I'm writing this, because I think the responses have been unfair
to Red Hat here.  The little change they as the sponsors of the
site did was that now people can lock the file they are
translating, and any body can see that it only adds mutual
exclusion to the system, which is much welcome, with almost no
drawback; and you go on and elaborate on how this change breaks
team work, consistency, management, Iraq war, Palestinian war,
US/Iran relationship, blah blah blah...

I don't like this attitude :(.

behdad (who do not speak Arabic;)


On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 26, 2004 at 10:09:08AM -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > [..]
> >
> > -	Language teams have a habit of appearing *after* someone has
> > 	done the first 99% of the translations
>
> That may be the case -- but it hasn't been in our experience. When we
> first took over the Fedora translation, we had a total of 5 translated
> strings out of 10664 [1]. Today, we stand at 89% [2], with the disputed
> dist.po being the only file that is not at 100%. I am not sure what has
> been sync'ed back to Fedora's CVS so far, but we have obviously
> suspended translations until we figure out where we stand.
>
> > The second problem here is I suspect a cultural difference - while the
> > Arabic translators may be used to trading essays with references a lot
> > of Westerners tend not to bother to read long things but like concise short
> > arguments.
>
> I usually write short to-the-point posts, but I felt it was necessary
> to give a background to those who are not familiar with Arabeyes' work,
> in order to be able to appreciate the magnitude of the issue (to us).
>
> > Having read those long posts I do not see why the new translation tools
> > are being blamed. They happened to come into existance at the same time
> > as the problem but that is all. The underlying problem appears to be
> > that there is a generally recognized project for Arabic translation and
> > Fedora doesn't currently reflect that - or other similar situations where
> > there is a clear project.
>
> Right on target. The system was misunderstood (apparently by more than
> just us).
>
> >
> > [..]
> >
> > Is the real solution in the case of translations with an established
> > team, actively translating Fedora simply to point all new signups
> > for Arabic to the Arabeyes project ? Or are there groups of Arabic
> > translators who have problems with the basis of Arabeyes ?
> >
>
> Another question would be, what can be done when there is another group of
> translators objecting to the pre-existing one, which has been doing the
> vast majority of the work?
>
>
> References:
> [1] http://www.arabeyes.org/~elzubeir/fedora_begin_status.html
> [2] http://www.arabeyes.org/misc/fedora_status_bar.html
>
> Regards,
>

--behdad
  behdad.org