MozillaZw L10n Meetup

Mozilla Zimbabwe L10n Meetup 30/01/14

Short and sweet:

Goals:
-meet in person
-create assets such as termbases, glossaries etc
-tweet the event
-move the translation progress up to 12%

Comment:
Successful meetup. All goals except final one realised. Project progress is at 11%

Long and Delicious:

What actually happened:

Team met at First Computers (a great venue that we agreed to go back to in future).
Five people are in the Ndebele L10n team and four managed to make it.

To kick everything off, we introduced ourselves and briefly explained how and why we’re working on the project.
After this,we watched the Mozilla Story Video.

One of our goals was to resolve the issue of translating English words that do not have a Ndebele equivalent. Some difficult words such as Remote Web Console, do not have a sensible equivalent in our language as Ndebele does not have many technological terms in its vocabulary. A resolution was made to keep things as simple for the user as possible by either leaving the word untranslated or localising it and give it a Ndebele form e.g the word browser could easily translate to ‘isibukiso’, but we decided to leave it as
‘i-bhrawuza’ as this is a term users will be more familiar with.

A constant challenge that we face as a team is unreliable and/or lack of access to the Internet. Most of us(Ndebele

L10n contributors) do not have access to the Internet at home, which means that we can only work on the project during breaks at work, in Internet Cafe’s or at school, something which is not very easy to do (and in my case, illegal). Zibusiso identified a way to get over this by showing us how to translate the files offline. A simple, and yet very effective method. The translation tool we’re using, pootle, allows teams/contributors to download individual files for offline- translating. Once done with this, all you have to do is upload the translated files to pootle when you get online. And since we do not currently have version control, we just assign each other to a file/folder, translate the files and then upload them to Pootle. Talk about a money and time saver.

We had a lively discussion about the future of our project and how much more work needs to be done. Our first priority right now is moving the project’s progress forward and fast at the same time ensuring that our translations are of high quality. To achieve this, we have assigned each other roles. Everyone in the team is expected to recruit people into this project, but I as a Mozilla Rep have the primary responsibility to recruit new contributors to the project. I have an additional role of acting as the team’s translation reviewer. , tasked himself with translating offline, making submissions to move the project forward.

Christabel is the project leader and will be a translator. Her duties will include, managing the translation project, setting goals for the team, liasing with the L10n drivers and other experienced localisers, mentoring new contributors and just making sure the project runs ok. I would like to take this moment to spotlight her. Thanks to Christabel, we have a translation project. She got this off the ground, started working on it and has been helping new contributors find their way. Christabel is the one who actually talked me into working on L10n. She has contributed more than 90% of the submisions so far. Christabel’s goal is to get more female contributors involved in our Localisation project.

The meetup went pretty well. We had hoped to get the project up to 12% progress but only managed 11%. We reached all the other metrics of meeting each other and tweeting the event. I’d like to take this time to thank First Computers Bulawayo for offering us a venue at an affordable price and a decent connection to the Internet. I had requested budget for this event to cover food and logistics. The money was well spent. Thank you to everyone who has/is working with us in our translation efforts.

The team decided to have a meetup like this one every month