Minutes from 19 Dec 2003 pre QCC meeting

["Youcef Rabah Rahal" <yrrahal42 at hotmail dot com>]

Salam all,

On Friday 19 Dec 2003 at 20:00 UTC was held a meeting to discuss the Quality 
Control Comitee creation. Due to the lack of participants, we simply 
discussed the mandate/duties of the 'Comitee'. A new date/time has been 
fixed to actually create the comitee.

Meeting from 20:10 to 21:35 UTC

Participants:
----------------
- Hassan Abdin.
- Ossama Khayat (late ;).
- Arafat Medini
- Youcef Rahal.
- Nadim Shaikli (the first 20 minutes).
- Munzir Taha.

Summary
------------
(To the participants: this part contains only the summary. If you want to 
manifest a personal point of view, don't hesitate).

The praticipants all agreed on the necessity to constitue this comitee in 
order to preserve consistency among all Arabeyes translation projects. There 
have been an agreement on these points concerning the mandate of the QCC:

1/ The QCC will be in charge of approving/disapproving the existing PO 
translations and suggesting new ones. This is done via the translation of a 
"Technical Wordlist" which will regroup computer terms gathered by Nadim (!) 
from GNOME/KDE/WhatEverElse POs. The details on how this will be done will 
be discussed when the comitee is created.

2/ The QCC will be in charge of writing documentation explaining how the 
translation should be done in matter of the terms used, syntax etc. This 
documentation is directed towards Arabeyes translators (newbies or not). 
This also mean the maintain of the existing documantation (Arabic 
Doumentation Standards, Translator Guide...).

3/ The Comitee will not go and check the POs one by one inside each project. 
It is the duty of the Coordinators and the translators to apply the QCC 
directives and maintain the consistency inside their projects. The 
coordinators have to actually make the control. Control means correcting the 
translations and keeping the consistency inside the project POs and pointing 
the working translatrors to the right translations. The comitee directives 
are mandatory. However, some flexibility will be tolerated (by having more 
than one translation per word for example).

4/ A meeting will be held on Tuesday, 23 Dec 2003 at 06:00 UTC to actually 
create the QCC. The presence of the Translation Coordinators is mandatory ! 
Anyone else (who can actually give a bit of their time to this work) is 
welcome.

----------------------
A few intersting points were also discussed, but were a little outide the 
scope of the meeting. But they are definetly to be discussed by the QCC 
after its creation:

1/ We should not teach people the rules of the Arabic Grammar/Orthorgraph 
(by writing docs) but simply point them to the existing resources. A 
translator is supposed to know Arabic or to teach himself those rules. There 
are already KDE/GNOME docs (Munzir). Yes, but Arabic has some specificities. 
We can write docs with the few rules we want to apply inside Arabeyes 
(Arafat,Ossama,Youcef).

2/ An interesting discussion, raised by Arafat, took place on how the 
actions should be translated: using 'fi3l amr' or 'masdar' ? It seems that 
there are many contexts and _one_ rule may not be sufficient.

----------------
A few personal remarks:

1/ I was expecting to actually create the QCC yesterday and start to do some 
real work. I was rather disappointed to see the lack of participation. This 
is a serious matter. The points discussed above have somehow been discussed 
by email already. We are going in circles again. If you have some remarks 
please confirm and be at the next meeting !

2/ I am wondering if we could imagine a tool that would ease the coordinator 
controling job. By a writing a few scripts ? (I don't have a clear idea on 
how this could be done anyway).

3/ Ossama, could you please write the agenda for the next meeting ?

4/ Well, Since the QCC will not actually _control_ the translations, what 
about an other name ?

-----

Regards,

Youcef.

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