Re: Fedora and Translation Teams

[Alan Cox <alan at redhat dot com>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 10:54:27PM -0700, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:
> Then why are you replying? ;) I think we all want to get this done in the
> best way it can be for Arabic. 

I think this argument illustrates the problem from the Fedora/Red Hat
viewpoint nicely. When someone contributes it is generally a good thing. At
the same time if there is a large community accepted project currently
doing the translation it is a good thing if that community is doing all
the work and keeping it consistent.

However

-	Our translation admins don't have a perfect knowledge
	of all translation teams
-	Some of them are split by bitter long running disputes so
	there is no right answer
-	Language teams have a habit of appearing *after* someone has
	done the first 99% of the translations

All this would probably be perfectly harmless except that to some groups
of people language, it's style, and "correctness" by some definition is
an incredibly important issue either for social, religious or political 
reasons.

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. 

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. 

Where there is not a clear group or where that group is small enough that
everyone really does know everyone else (as for example in the Welsh
translation group) the new system works well and helps. 

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 ?

Alan