Arabize Linux with Arabeyes :-)

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

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Salam,

I have just sent the message below to the 10 persons who registered lately for 
an account with us. I'll send it to ~20 other people in the coming hours.

It is also directed to all the persons on this list. You simply change the 
first sentence 'You have recently subscribed for an Arabeyes.org account' to 
'You are subscribed to this mailing list' :-)

Please read it thouroughly and give us a hand.

Regards,

====

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,

PS: If you will to help (which we really look forward to), you can:

1/ Read and follow the guidelines of the Translator Guide:
   http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/guide/translator-guide-en/

2/ Start exercising yourself by translating this test file and sending it back
to me by email:

http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/translate/mandrake/Attic/krozat.pot?rev=1.1

Thank you beforehand.

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