GNOME Translation Project IRC meeting

tl;dr; : https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/IRCMeeting20121006

During the Translation BoF meeting held on GUADEC we set some objectives/priorities/things-to-look-at.

One of them was about doing regular-ish meetings… and you got lucky! There will be one this Saturday itself!

So join us on #i18n channel around 21:00 UTC+2. Details, agenda and everything else (not much more actually …) on the tl;dr; link :)

See you *all* there!

 

Same lies, new look

Doesn’t it look great? Thanks to Vinicius Depizzol that started it some time ago and Tom Tryfonidis who finished it (and I’m just getting the credit :) we have a new amazing-looking theme for our beloved Damned-Lies!

If you happen to meet any of them, be sure to thank them!!

Even the stats look so great:

Don’t you feel an urge to start translating just for the sake of browsing it? :)

Again, thanks to Vinicius to start it and Tom to make it happen!

GNOME 3.6 is out!

GNOME 3.6 is out!

Go celebrate it! We all made an amazing job!

The Catalan team, just like lots of other amazing translation teams did a great job and made it again! Congratulations to all translators who have been working so hard this last weeks. I’m really looking forward to the GNOME digest about the last week and this one :) On the two other previous weeks was already a lot of activity (1186 and 771 each week)

Now, for GNOME 3.8!

bash tip of the day

After spending an hour or so staring at a regular expression in bash, I gave up and started looking at the interwebs… So what’s wrong on this?

random="aabbcc"
if [[  $random =~ "^a{1,2}b{1,2}c{1,2}$"  ]]; then
    echo "matching"
else
    echo "not matching"
fi

It’s supposed to compare $random with a regular expression (that’s what’s supposed to do the =~ operator). But no matter how hard I tried, it was always “not matching”

Fortunately this days we have stackoverflow with the answers.

 

 

 

 

(some spacing so that you can think on it….)

 

 

 

 

 

Short answer: no quotes around a regular expression!

I start getting a pattern here (punt intended), the clueless I’m usually while trying to find the solution, the easiest it is :)

freezed, welcome and glibc

Freeze

You already know it probably, yes, it’s freezing time in GNOME!

Developers, please ask for, few ;), string freeze breaks as soon as you notice them, translators go full-steam to translate this lovely GNOME 3.6 that is around the corner!

Translation teams are working hard to update their translations, and some of them already reached the 100% mark, congratulations!!

Do you speak any language on that list? There’s no better time than now to show your support to GNOME  and to your language and start contributing to it! Please, join the GNOME translations teams ((Or create a new one!)) so that more and more users can use our beloved Desktop in their loved language!

 

Central Nahuatl

Just like translating GNOME is a never ending task, everyday strings come and go, the GNOME Translation Project is also and ever growing one!

Today marks the first translation from Central Nahuatl! Congratulations to Jorge Becerril and everyone that helped him!

The road to a fully localized GNOME will be long and from time to time a bit hard, but we all, the GTP members, will try to ease the peace as much as possible, but…

glibc

glibc is a bit on Central Nahuatl way. For a language that does not have a locale definition on glibc is like it doesn’t exist, you can translate GNOME, GIMP, KDE, whichever FOSS software that you like, but without a way to select that language, translating is meaningless.

So, dear interwebs, anyone got a good contact with glibc maintainers to streamline the locale creation process?

Finally, dear translators out there: Happy translating!

 

Red pandas are taking over Alexanderplatz!

If you have been to Berlin ((Maybe two years ago at the last Desktop Summit? ;) )) you know Alexanderplatz S+U station.

Since some days ago, huuuuuge ads where put in there. It looks really nice to be surrounded by FOSS ads on the way to work :)

I do really like the “We work for you not for shareholders” ((You see, my Deutsch is getting better!)) :D

Quo vadis?

duringtheromanempirealltextwaswrittenlikethiswithoutanypunctuationmark
spaceswhatsoeverwhybecauseonlyfewpeopleknewhowtoreadandtheywerereally
goodatittheyweretrainedalotandtheycouldeasilyreadtheonlyfewbooks
availablewithoutanyproblem[1]

Latin by the roadside

later on as the scholarship was opened and more and more people was able to learn how to read writers had to start thinking on how to create clues to the future reader so that (s)he would be able to read and pronounce their text as it should be they no longer could expect that a professional reader would be reading its text but maybe it would be a commoner who just happened to have had so much luck that (s)he was taught some reading 101[2]

Time flies! (phew!) and the more, and more, the scholarship and knowledge is spread around, “funny” characters are created – to make the reading easier. Obviously! The easier it is to read a text, the more, possible, readers that it will get the text!

GNOME

As we all, lucky ones of us, saw at the keynote ((The History of GNOME)) by Federico, Jonathan and David, GNOME early days where pretty much hacker-only enabled.

Luckily, the first spaces and sentence delimiters started to appear: the HIG, the early work on a11y, l10n, i18n, the teams that started to be created, the Foundation…

Fast forward to present we are jumping all over Unicode adding all missing punctuation marks on GNOME 3 to make it the best desktop experience that this thousands and thousands of new electronic device owners will need to feel in control of their devices.

I’m excited! And you know?! GNOME 3.6 is around the corner! Help out making the dots, dashes, spaces, parenthesis, quotation marks be fully integrated in our desktop to make it the most beautiful and easy to use desktop ever seen!

[1] During the Roman empire all text was written like this: without any punctuation mark, spaces, whatsoever! Why? Because only few people knew how to read, and they were really good at it. They were trained a lot and they could easily read the only few books available without any problem.

[2] No need to retype it right? ;)

PTotD

… also known as Python Tip of the Day:

What’s wrong (translation-wise) on this snippet of python code?

random = _("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, " +
           "consectetur adipisicing elit")

You are not going to see any warning on your code, if you don’t have this message translated you will never notice…

But unfortunately, as soon as you have this message translated you will notice that only half of the string is translated, which for Arabic or other RTL ((Right to Left)) languages can be quite funny…

So, you already noticed right?

Turns out that gettext gets confused by the plus sign! As you already may remember by now, Python can join multiple strings just by putting them together, no need for a plus sign. Try it yourself on your python console:

>>> print ("Lorem " " ipsum" " dolor"
... " amet")
Lorem  ipsum dolor amet

So dear Python developers out there, pretty please double check your strings marked for translation, if not a translator will find out, hopefully before a release, and report it back :)

Planet GNOME

Seems that I pestered enough our (that sound good!) planet editor ((Wo was so nice to also create my planet hackergotchi!)) that he finally added me in. Hi GNOMEr’s around the globe!!

I’m Gil Forcada, Coordinator of the Catalan Translator Team, member of the Localization Coordination Team, nowadays also Damned-Lies maintainer and usually you see me on GUADEC’s behind the info desk :D

I’m all digital ears to digitally hear anything related to l10n/i18n and how to move GTP ((GNOME Translation Project)) forward!

Edit: fixed the \ on the second code snippet (no need for that) and the LTR to RTL! Oh my!

Mark some gnome-love in Damned-Lies

Wonderful news for Damned-Lies, and hence by you all dear translators!

Some days ago I was approached by a teacher at Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte which plans to make his students work on Damned-Lies!

So he needs small bugs that his students could be able to tackle. So pretty please, submit bugzilla reports, or leave a comment if you are lazy, and mark them with gnome-love.

Hopefully new contributors will be born and Damned-Lies will increase its quality and make translators more productive :)

GUADEC wrap-up

I already did a wrap-up on the Translation BoF that we held during GUADEC, but a GUADEC, even late, is still needed :)

In one word: AMAZING!

Maybe the financial crisis, companies taking other paths that do not cross with GNOME’s one, some staring at abyss, or other factors, but, for me, GUADEC started a bit nostalgic “the good old times where better”, but…

GUADEC, just like Dave Neary described ((He made a really good comparison between an Ethernet extender and GUADEC. The first regenerates the signal so that it can continue going forward through the cable, and GUADEC, is just like the same but for GNOME, it makes sure that the project continues alive and kicking for, at least, another year more, 15 and counting!)) on the opening session back at Vilanova i la Geltrú (GUADEC 2006) refueled GNOME community and its members.

As always, members gather not only to discuss and meet, but mostly to keep ties stronger and to enjoy and have fun together.

The parties were really good ((Not too much loud music so that everyone can hear and speak to each other)), both the venue and the accommodation were great and the city is fantastic!

Seems that GNOME OS is taking shape, all teams are working full steam on it and discussions, by now, seems technical and not too flamy :)

GSOC, GWOP and newcomers

As a seasoned GUADEC goer I stopped quite a few GSOC, GWOP and newcomers in general to ask them about it, why did they come, were they enjoying it, had they plans to stick around and come to next GUADEC…

Not surprisingly all of them replied with a big smile and a “Of course!”. We say GNOME is all about people, it users, its developers and the community that we all embrace, just by looking at them, how they were interacting with everyone and generally, just having lots of fun with everyone just reminded me how much I love GNOME and its community, all of you rock!!

For us maybe it’s a given, everyone is welcomed and should feel like it is welcomed, but I’ve seen quite a few other communities (FOSS and non FOSS ones) where new contributors were having quite a hard time, or that long time contributors where not helpful at all to say the least.

We should be really proud and make sure we keep that fantastic record of being one of the warmest and welcoming FOSS communities around ;)

Local team

I can not end a GUADEC recap without a special note for the local team: guys, you did such an amazing job!

The five minutes applause, everyone standing up, that we give to all volunteers on the closing sessions isn’t enough to gratefully thank you all for all the amazing work that you all did! As Alan likes, every detail matters, an on this last GUADEC, every detail was taken care of. Just to name a few:

  • the cabling on the hall was perfect: a lot of them and also in an open space so that conversations were possible
  • the GNOME foot on the floor to guide you, simply brilliant!
  • the info desk was going so smooth (and I’ve been to quite a few to be able to say that) that I feel that I was more a distraction that someone useful!
  • the parties organizations: good places, well connected, good food and drinks, music not too loud…

If I was a Strasbourg or Brno GUADEC bidder I would be really worried to try, not to make it better, but just to keep the level they set up. Sorry to repeat myself, but great work local team!