KDE arabic translation is about to be 100% but

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

Hi Sirs! Hi  Stephan Kulow!

We are a team from King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and 
we like from time to time to support open source movement by doing 
translations, development, font designing, financial support, ...

Previously, we have contributed translation to OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and 
leverage KDE translation from around 52% to 79% at July/August 2004. Surely, 
there was a previous partially available translations on which we build on. 
We, KACST, cooperated with arabeyes.org (I am already a member there) via 
uploading the files to their local cvs repository and then they committed it 
here on KDE main repository. Since arabeyes.org is a voluntarily project with 
always a busy KDE maintainer, KDE used to always be lagging behind other 
projects. We, KACST, seeing the importance of KDE did our best to change this 
situation.

Our problem is that due to the lack of a timely proper sync and some scripts 
deficiencies, we lost hundereds if not thousands of translated strings on the 
past. We asked to have a direct access to the KDE repository but it's not 
welcomed since the attitude here is to have one KDE maintainer that he alone 
could commit the files. This is good as far as the KDE maintainer is being 
able to sync on time. This proves not possible with the Arabic language 
maintainer due to him being extremely busy even just to do this a few minutes 
jobs. I complained in many threads in arabeyes doc mailing list about us 
being hindered by this process.

A quote from the Arabic KDE maintainer:
<quote>
you are expected to produce results in a timely fashion. The good lot of us at 
Arabeyes are not. Which means that whatever organization needs to produce 
this work needs to work around our working schedules. The reality is, I too 
have a job and am too expected to produce results in a timely fashion.

Welcome to Open Source and Volunteer based work.
</quote>

For example the situation now is:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/KDE_3_3_BRANCH/ar/index.php
65.41 % translated

http://www.arabeyes.org/misc/kde_status_bar.html
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=KDE
93% translated


This is surely doesn't suit us as a professional governmental organization 
that has deadlines and review cycles for each project.

Now since we have almost finished the translation, I am not asking for a cvs 
access. All I want is just someone (coolo?) to make a sync for us. I can send 
him those files to commit them or he can grab them from arabeyes until the 
Arabic KDE maintainer find time to do a sync.

Keep up the good work!



I am cc'ing arabeyes doc list.

-- 
Munzir Taha  PGP Key available
gpg --recv-keys --keyserver www.mandrakesecure.net F0671821

Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Mandrake Club Member
Maintainer of the Open Arabic Bugs Project at
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs
Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS, Linux+, LPI 101
New Horizons CLC, Riyadh, SA