Arabeyes Translation Teams.

["Djihed Afifi" <djihedlists at googlemail dot com>]

Salam

The more I look into the men count that we have for translation, the
more I realise we are in a sore need for more translators. For
example, for gnome 2.16, which is expected to be completed somewhere
at the start of September, I'm seeing only three dedicated
translators, the maintainer who is too stretched out and still doing a
heck of a job (thank you Youssef), Raffah and myself. Let me put it
simply to you: Arabic Gnome 2.16 won't ship with only us, I've thought
about this realistically for a long time. Translation projects are
slipping from under our attention quickly. Thankfully, we just barely
have enough time to do something about it.

Please take this seriously, we took it upon ourselves to be The
Ones(tm) when it came to Arabic translation, so we should live up to
the responsibility, Arabeyes is always here, and will never go under.
The actual task: the translation should be the end goal, not the
popularity of a website or the dedication of a handful of team
members. The current system is too high for many potential
translators, we're not gaining anything from it, we're actually
locking people out of the translation effort in the name of
"dedication" and "commitment", a goal Arabeyes has not even achieved
beyond a couple dozen or so part-time translators. We need to make
things *work*, not to over analyse people's behaviour philosophically.
May be I'm too much of a pragmatic person, I believe pragmatism is
what we need ATM and ASAP.

This is also necessary to *contain* all Arabic translation efforts.
Instead of being selective by raising the bar high for entrants,
Arabeyes should embrace every possible translator. I wonder why we
complain about not too many active members when we're being elitist.
Again, the goal is not to form a group of elitists, let's drop the
arrogance attitude a bit towards new comers, and move the Arabic
translation train into its rails again. We're the only serious Arabic
translators in the scene, it's a great *responsibility*, even
religiously, if religion holds any place in you.

Please understand that 99.99% of Arabic computer users out there are
not as tech savvy as you are (actually, that's the reason only you
survived the obstacles..), the language(English) and the terminology
(IT) form a learning curve that is simply too steep for them.

May be you're wondering what I'm expecting from this email. I'm
expecting a revision of the whole translation process. Currently, new
translators have to register to the website, read 99 manuals,
subscribe to the mailing lists, get a CVS account (which means they
have to be CLI masters). Remember, it's like a filter, every step in
the way potentially discourages many people away. You require that
level of dedication from may be core developers, or at most all
developers, but not of every translator whose only interest is
translating strings. After all, getting a CVS account and subs'ing to
a mailing list is no guarantee for dedication, how many people have
CVS accounts but are not or were never dedicated?

I can hear you saying "but.... if we don't request them to do that
they will not be dedicated", They don't even know how to do that,
mate. Another would say: "... if we won't request that they read those
99 manuals they will bombard us with questions", to that I say, so
what, let them ask, please drop the arrogant RTFM[1] attidude whenever
someone asks a seemingly (to you) simple question, nobody was born a
master. If somebody asks "How do you enable Arabic in windows", a bad
answer would be to just give him a link to a 12 page manual, a good
answer might be "You go to control panel, you do this ..etc, this is
also explained here: link". We should win hearts first, if you win a
heart, you win the mind.

Please understand that this is not a rant, I'll put my hand first on
the table to get this moving. We need to *work*, to get things
*working* and to show that we actually *mean business*.

Finally, after we fix our wrecked (in my opinion) translation and
recruitment process, we should then think of real concrete steps to
recruit more translators, I'll leave that after this discussion.

Please voice your opinion even if you'll only write a couple of words.

Djihed

[1]read the flipping manual