Translation Sprint for Gaia

Last saturday i.e. 29th December 2012 we had a translation sprint for Ankur India with specific focus on Gaia localization. The last few weeks saw some volunteers introducing themselves to participate in translation and localization. The Firefox OS seemed like a popular project with them that was also easy to translate. However, the reigning confusion with the tool of choice, was not easy to workaround. The new translators were given links to the files they could translate, and send over to the mailing list/mentor for review. Going back and forth in the review process was taking time and we quickly decided on the mailing list, a date to have a translation sprint. We used the IRC channel #ankur.org.in and gathered there from 11 in the morning to 4 in the evening. The initial hour was spent to set up the repository and to decide how we were going to manage the tasks between ourselves. Two of us had commit rights on the Mozilla mercurial repository. Of the 5 translators, two participants were very new to translation work, so it was essential to help them with constant reviews. By the end of the second hour, we were string crunching fast and hard, translators were announcing which modules they were picking (after some initial overlooking of this, prolly due to all the excitement) and then pushing them into the mercurial repository. We shut shop at the closing time, but had a clear process in place which allowed people to continue their work and continue the communication over email. All it needed was an IRC channel and a fundamental understanding of the content translation and delivery cycle.

SUMMARY

Participants:

• Biraj Karmakar (biraj),
• Priyanka Nag (priyanka_nag),
• Runa Bhattacharjee (arrbee/runa_b)
• Samrat Bhattacharya (samratb),
• Sayak Sarkar (sayak)

Translation Statistics:

• At Mozilla Dashboard – 39% translated. (Does not include the files still being reviewed)

What worked:

• Communication was live
• Faster turnaround of translation -> reviews -> revision
• Queries were resolved faster
• Commits were immediately made into the repository
• Workflow was established to ensure the committers were being notified of files ready to go into the repository
• No overlapping of translation

What could have been nicer:

• A simpler tool to track the translation, through *one* interface. (Discussed many times earlier, and comments can be directed to the earlier post)
• Pre-decided work assignments to start things off (this was rather hastily put up)
• More time

Follow up:

• There is still more to do and the translation has to continue. Not just for Gaia, but for other projects as well.
• A review session for all the translated content. Besides catching errors and omissions of various nature, this can be of particular benefit to the new translators who can gauge the onscreen context of the content that they had to blindly translate