Review please

[Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org>]

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Salam,

I'll send the rather-long-message below to say the ~30 (or 50 ? ;) recently 
registered people. Please review.

If I don't get any answer in the coming 24 hours I'll consider it's fine and 
I'll start sending it. You can also make the process faster by replying as 
soon as you read it :-)

Salam,

===================

Salam,

You have recently subscribed for an Arabeyes.org account and thus showed 
interest in our mandate and goals.

As you know, our main goal is to provide the Arabic user with an open source 
system that fully supports the Arabic language. One way to achieve this is to 
translate the many open source projects out there, or at least the most used 
and the most famous of these projects.

Currently we are involved in the localization of 6 projects. However, the 
projects that need an urgent contribution are:

1/ KDE           http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=KDE
2/ GNOME         http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=GNOME
3/ MandrakeLinux http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Mandrake

And we might be involved in the very near future in other projects.

We also translate a list of English words into Arabic, in order to provide 
among other things an open source English->Arabic dictionary:

4/ Wordlist http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Wordlist
   See also: 
   http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=QaMoose
   http://qamoose.arabeyes.org/

There are only a few translators working on a regular basis on these projects. 
To be precise, there are no more than ~3 active translators per project. They 
are doing as best as they can to translate the enormous amount of 
untranslated messages (for example, on the GNOME project, ~20 000/50 000 
messages have been translated).

However, with ~10 translators working on GNOME, each one of them translating 
100 messages/week, we can for example finish the GNOME project in less than 7 
months (to be compared with 2 years since we started to work on the project, 
due to the lack of a sufficient number of active translators).

Now, you may ask, is the task of translating 100 messages/week easy to do ? 
The answer is of course YES ! And the most important is that you can 
translate that great amount of messages and you'll continue to be able to 
volunteer in other parts, either with Arabeyes if you find something that 
interests you, or in any other field.

How is that possible ? Simply by dedicating 20 minutes/day, 5 days/week !!! 
Indeed, in 20 minutes (such a short period), you can translate in average, 20 
strings. If you do that 5 days/week, you can thus do your 100 messages/week.

Now you may wonder how come there are not 10 translators to do such an easy 
task ? We unfortunately don't have an answer for that question... There are 
more than 300 persons who registered for an account with Arabeyes.org and 
then they simply vanished. If only 10% of these people join in to translate 
100 message a week, we'll finish our translation projects in a few weeks ! 
Which will allow us to enhance the quality of the available translated 
projects and eventually get involved to translate new ones. The most 
important thing here, is that together we can share the work and get it done 
faster.

Now, what you must remember is that wether your interests lie in development, 
in artwork or in any other field, you can continue to do that. You'll simply 
dedicate 20 min everyday. And you'll find that the requirement to do that job 
are rather easy:

1/ Knowledge of Arabic and English.
2/ Less than an hour to read the documentation and get familiar with the 
translation tools and with CVS (if you are not already familiar with them, 
that is).

That's all ! Is that hard ? Sure it is not.

So, if you are interested, please reply as soon as possible to this email and 
let us know, so we can assign you a file to translate (if you wish, you can 
also tell us what project from the 4 enumerated above you want to contribute 
to).

Please remember that your volunteering work is vital to the community. We are 
all volunteers working on our spare time in order the make the dream for a 
full Arabic-aware Linux distribution, a REALITY !

Salam, 

- -- 
Youcef R. Rahal
Arabeyes.org
http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal
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