A step by step guide to setting up Lokalize & svn for translations

[Guntupalli Karunakar]

On Sat, 29 Aug 2020 11:47:41 +0530
Raghavendra Kamath wrote:

> On Friday, 28 August, 2020 1:26:45 PM IST Guntupalli Karunakar
> wrote:
> > Added the guide here.
> > https://indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/KDETranslationGuide
> 
> Awesome. Thank you for this.
> 

Haven't gotten to update it, as wiki version needed an upgrade.
Also some issues in image handling, unable to upload/get thumbnails
preview.

> > I will update it with screenshots, also reformatting the text.
> 
> I was about to mail you about this matter. 
> Apart from this KDE translation effort. I currently see Indian
> translators working in silos and separate team with no good
> communications. For example things like these would be valuable to
> other teams too. Would Indlinux be a good place to bring them
> together? 
>

Question is how many have you seen. I would be surprised if its more
than 10.

IndLinux was that forum where ppl got together, around 2002-2010.
What has happened is there are very few who have done it for the love
of the language.
For many contributing translations become an entry point into
FOSS,which while being ok, it meant that after some work done, ppl
moved on.
Except for Malayalam, Tamil - which have been consistent,  to some
extent Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi - dependent on 1-2 persons. All other
languages practically went dead.

Then there was the aspect of supported work - where work was done as
part of job (translators on payroll), or translation sprints
sponsored by the project (so logistics got paid for, along with
goodies). Then at some point translators lost the jobs or moved on to
other paths.
Actually maybe list is not appropriate to put it all here - the
history & politics & economics of it!

Lot of past contributors have moved on in life, so no longer into
FOSS translations. So at the moment best maybe see how many are there
and assess what & how much can they do.
This is the state across projects - Gnome, LibreOffice etc. 
Except for maybe Mozilla where they still have some traction.

KDE translation efforts peaked at some point between 2003-2009, post
which many languages were not further updated, except for Hindi &
Punjabi to some extent.

Then there is the broader issue of whether are there people using the
localized interface, beyond the contributors themselves. This has
been difficult to assess.
So while there may be many users who use FOSS in Indian languages for
their work , communication , not many maybe using localized
interfaces. 
With mobiles becoming the primary interface for many , perhaps the
earlier expectation of bigger userbase and section demanding
localized interface for desktop has become redundant.

> I am ready to help you in this. Please let me know if you need any
> help.
> 
> Also we mostly communicate with each other through Matrix/Element,
> there is a free software community chatroom set up by Free software
> community of India [1]. You can login to the chatroom here [2] . It
> would be great to communicate with you in real time and other
> members will also be excited to see you.
> 

Maybe we could setup for a once in 2 weeks meeting. maybe 30min
session to begin with.
While at work I am unable to access IRC, doing
it on phone is cumbersome.

> If sourceforge mailing list is a problem, Free Software community
> of India provides hosting of mailing lists [3]. We can migrate the
> mailing list there if it is required. 
> 

Sourceforge list was not a problem, except that they changed some
policy in 2017, due to which all subscribers to mailing lists were
asked to re-subscribe. In that event lost 90% of members. Even I
failed to subscribe back into some lists.

On the list part I was thinking if this list could be renamed to
kde-l10n-in or kde-l10n-indic  , so if there are other language folks
they could all be in one place. 

> [1] https://fsci.org.in/
> [2] https://chat.poddery.com/
> [3] https://lists.fsci.in/postorius/lists/
> 

Will check it out.

Karunakar