Re: Solutions Linux 2005

[Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian dot org>]

> Of course, it was nice to see (a part of?) the Debian French community
> in action. I could not help myself dreaming about the day when _we_
> could all meet at a conf or an expo or...

Something I have to add to Youcef's comments : the other days, I add
some more contacts around Arabic localization. I especially had a very
long discussions with two fellows who came at our booth after seeing
the nice desktop screen I pointed you to (Ossama added the picture in
the gallery).

Basically, there were these two young men, one born in Algeria and
another one in Morocco, IIRC, who are currently students in France
and indeed very interested in Arabic localization.

Unfortunately, I am to blame as I forgot to pick up their names (a
booth is a booth and it may become quite messy sometimes!). However,
they have my Debian "business" card and, more important, I pointed
them to Arabeyes as THE project to join when interested in Arabic
localization.

We chatted about one hour together and I guess they were highly
interested in joining the project, so expect more input to come out
soon.

I also had some discussion with Mohammed Adnène Trojette, student at
Ecole Central Paris, who already contributes to the French
localization team (so we already had exchanges in the past) and is
also an Arabic speaker (from Belgium)...then obviously interested in
ar localization.

I also talked about the Tamazight localisation, not only with Youcef,
but also with one of the two fellows I mentioned above, as he
mentioned me he is (like 60% of the population in Morocco) of
"Berbère" origin (dunno how to write Berbère in English). I also had
another talk with Mr Rahi, another visitor at our booth, about the
kabyle/tamazight localization. I mentioned all these people that a
very early work has been done on a kab_DZ locale and I may expect that
something emerges from this (we often mentioned the name of Samia
Bouzefrane who has already setup a lexicon of computer terms in the
kabyle language). So, even if the language itself lacks normalization,
some activity could start around it.

I'm not sure whether this is relevant to Arabeyes : it's probably up
to you people to decide that, I guess.

As a conclusion, I have the feeling that some huge "manpower" lies in
the Maghreb community for participating in Arabic
localization. Remember that Arabic is estimated to be now the second
language spoken in France and the link between Maghreb countries and
France is still (and will remain) very strong. So, as a conclusion,
there is a great opportunity here for getting more involvement in
Arabic localisation and I sincerely hope that a great progress will be
made in next years.

I indeed dream of a Debian booth in a few exhibitions and/or expos in
Maghreb.


Thanks again to all involved peopel and especially Youcef. We both
know that our discussion was very high profit for both of us..:-)