Re: Fedora and Translation Teams

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 13:28, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:
[...]
> To all Arabeyes members who are involved in translations, I would
> strongly advise you to join the fedora translation list [1] to voice
> your opinions, in order to allow the Fedora maintainers to better
> understand our requirements.

I don't think I belong to that class, but I was interested in seeing
what is happening. I have requested mailing list membership but I got no
answer. Incidentally, I notice that your message has not made it to the
fedora-trans-list.

I think that the fedora people want to encourage as much translation as
possible. However, the idea is still not ripe.

That being said, I think fedora has to encourage both individuals and
team. That is, promoting individual work for languages that don't have
existing teams, and utilising existing teams where they exist.

It is understandable that they will not prevent someone who wants to
participate, but they should encourage coordination. I would suggest:

- They acknowledge teams that are actually active by giving them the
maintainer status for the language. Active teams are those teams that
are doing more than half the work currently done.
- Probably they can keep the idea that anybody can 'take' a module,
because that does not mean he/she is the translator for it. I would
suggest that the automatic freeing mechanism be in place, so if somebody
takes a module but does nothing in it, it will be freed automatically.
The maintainer should have the right to free a module; this right should
be used judiciously. This keeps the group in control.
- There should be a large and markable difference between the timeout
for an individual and a team. For example, if a single person does not
commit back in 24 hours, the module should be released. OTOH, a team can
commit back every week for example, as they coordinate work among
themselves before batch committing to fedora. As already suggested, this
period should shorten as we are approaching a release.
- Once a module has been translated 100%, only the maintainer should be
able to review it, to avoid unnecessary complications. Naturally,
special cases can be dealt with through fedora people (currently Sarah
and Bernd).
- While an individual can translate directly bypassing the team, the
problems with this can be avoided: if his work is up to standards then
no worry, else the team will usually correct his work when he releases
the module. Coordination between that individual and the team is
beneficial to both parties to avoid lost labour as in this case.

I hope this is enough food for thought for the time being.

Salam,
Muhammad Alkarouri