Arabeyes - Rosetta: An invitation to a better cooperation

[Youssef Chahibi <chahibi at gmail dot com>]

السلام عليكم

   Let me introduce myself. I am Youssef Chahibi, KDE Arabic translations team 
coordinator and an active member in other Arabeyes (http://www.arabeyes.org) 
projects. Arabeyes is an umbrella project that aims to standardize and unify 
Arabic free software Arabization efforts. After years of unconcentrated 
Arabic support and translation projects, with each translator working in 
his/her side, Arabeyes was brought to existence to ensure a better future for 
Arabic in the free software world and to make Arabic translators and 
programmers work as one team in one sole promising project.

  After many years of work, despite the lack of contributors, specially from 
Arab countries, Arabeyes is still starving to make free software speak 
Arabic: Ongoing active translation projects are : Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, 
Mozilla, etc, with some reaching the 100% limit. In parallel, there are 
general projects to make translations better and more homogenous, notably 
through the Technical Dictionary project 
(http://wiki.arabeyes.org/Technical_Dictionary) and the many discussions in 
the wiki, along with development work, like Ayaspell, the Arabic 
spell-checker, Gprayer, prayer time notification application, improvements to 
former projects and involvement in other free software projects.

   Arabeyes is not owned by anyone but the whole 
free software Arabic-speaking community. Hence the important of a strategic 
cooperation between Arabic free software translators.

   We had a look at Rosetta's capabilities and enjoyed its ease of use and the 
straight-forward translation project. However, we couldn't pass by the many 
issues we faced, duplicating your effort and underestimating your work.

   First, Rosetta's translation are only committed to Ubuntu repositories, 
therefore no other distribution benefit from them, none of your translation 
is committed to mothership projects (Gnome CVS, KDE SVN...).
  Second, Rosetta does only concentrate on current versions of Ubuntu 
packages, while we in Arabeyes translate the latest strings and are 
up-to-date with the latest mothership changes. In other words, you may be 
translation strings that will not appear in next versions.
   Third, Rosetta doesn't always import our translations that are the official 
repositories, you may be translating strings that have been already 
translated.
   Forth, we can't ensure a better quality of translations unless we work 
together in qualitative projects like the Technical Dictionary.
   Fifth, Rosetta is not a free software.
  Sixth, Rosetta Arabic translations are not QA-ed (Quality assured), this 
can't be easily made outside a unified project.

   Many translation teams, other than Arabic, are upset and worry about the 
future of Rosetta translations, the issue was raised many times in the 
gnome-i18n kde-doc-i18n mailing. For example, Gnome and Debian took the 
decision to prepare a Pootle server. We don't like seeing your translations 
going no where. Many former Rosetta users are now participating in 
Arabeyes.We want you and and us be brought together in a unified project. 
Despite the lack of contributors, we managed to make Gnome more than 96% 
translated, KDE is getting more and more contributors, with more translated 
strings than Gnome. We invite you to get in touch with the project 
(lists.arabeyes.org) or via our IRC channel #arabeyes in irc.freenode.net .


- Youssef Chahibi