[dot] A Galician Government Representative Meets KDE Translators

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1153440459/

From: marce <mvillarino at users.sourceforge.net>
Dept: we've-got-no-preference
Date: Thursday20/Jul/2006, @17:07

A Galician Government Representative Meets KDE Translators
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   Last Saturday, a representative from the Galician Government
[http://www.xunta.es] in Spain met members of the Trasno project
[http://www.trasno.net]. This project includes Free Software volunteer
translators for the Galician language, from a wide range of Free
software projects including KDE.  The government representative was Mr.
Antonio Pérez Casas, Adviser for the Information Society of the Industry
and Innovation Councillor.

     Six people came to the meeting from the Trasno team including
Xavier García Feal, coordinator of the KDE galician language team, two
other KDE translators, a couple of translators from Gnome and the author
of the Galician ispell dictionaries.

     The Adviser informed us that they are about to launch a forge site
to host Galician free-software projects. The craze for on-line
translation tools also arose when he noted that they were considering to
set up a Rosetta like site for translations. This project will be
closely related to Mancomun [http://mancomun.org], another site recently
launched motivated by the release of the first fully localised
OpenOffice.org release.

     The meeting had a friendly atmosphere, despite the recent frictions
related to the OpenOffice translation.

     We told the representative of the future plans and needs of the
Trasno project. At the present time we are switching our web page to a
wiki. To fullfill the desire of having a full desktop in the official
Galician language, we urged the Councillor's adviser to improve the
Galician Hunspell dictionary and to integrate this into KSpell.
Additionally the attending translators noted the need for more
volunteers. We expressed that we would prefer the government to evaluate
Pootle [http://pootle.wordforge.org/] as an online translation tool.

     The Councillor's Adviser noted that the regional ministry was not
considering creating a new Linux distribution nor to massively deploy
any other distribution.

     After the meeting KDE's team chatted for a time, exchanging
thoughts. This was our first face to face meeting.

     We shared a lot of similar ideas.  Galicia has two official
languages. Any deployment would demand both localisations. The Galician
government has paid 120 000 for the localisation of OpenOffice.org. But
they are now finding that there is still a lot of work to do and it will
be very expensive.  It would be cool, and a good sign, if the Trasno
project could get a server with revision control and Pootle.  With a
"project liaison" we could get in sync with upstream repositories, while
still being able to work off-line.  We were also aware that we need more
help.