Gnome

Out of the loop

2011-10-12T01:17:00.000-07:00

Since the internship was over I have been so busy and had no chance what so ever to complete some of the translations I have been working on. I had no time even to open my laptop but from now on I will make time to contribute and finish what I started and to learnt in the process.

Watch this space.

Translators

2011-08-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

I have realised one thing about gnome translators,most of them or maybe all of them are programers. They know the technical stuf about software and how to do different things in terms of contributing to gnome. I am a translator a pure translator, I did not study programming or hacking and all of that technical stuff but I will learn everything that I need to.

Many people assume that you know what goes on in the Gnome community, but I am happy to let you know that I am growing with time. I still have a lot of things to learn I must admit but i know that with the help of this friendly community I will be a worthy contributer.

One day I will commit my own translations and I will look back at this day and smile.

At the moment I am trying to recruite some Zulu translators so that they can also be part of the Zulu team, we need all the help we can get. Getting more people involved means that our terminology has to be more consistant than ever.

Almost

2011-08-12T01:14:00.000-07:00

I had to write this blog today because I realised that next week is the last week of my Gnome outreach program internship and I was sad when I thought about this. I still have a lot of work to do but I know that just because the internship is nearing the end it does not mean that I should stop the work that I am doing. I still have five more applications that I have to translate.

I have a lot of things to learn about the Gnome community, I have met a lot of people who helped me throught this journey of discovery and I appreciate each and every second that I have spend dicussing problems and the ways to solve them with you guys. I have learnt a lot about Gnome itself and realised a lot of things go into making it what it is (An owesome operating system).

In second half of my internship I had planned to translate the following:

Glib

Gnome-Bluetooth = translated = tested

Gnome-control-center = translated = tested

Gnome-power-manager = translated

Gnome-screensaver

Gnome-Shell = translated = tested

Gvfs

Nautilus

Yelp = translated

You will see above that I managed to translate and test a few of them. The remaining five I will translate during the cource of next week.

My mentor friedel Wolff is the one who has been so kind to commit the translations for me, and I appreciate it very much. I am starting to see more green bars on damned lies, that is an inspiration on my part.

Marketing Gnome

2011-08-10T02:12:00.000-07:00

With the review being done it seems like the translations are taking forever to be finished. I am not very good in planning and my mentor Friedel Wolff always tells me that "You can't do anything without planning first", well i always do things without planning them and they always come out right, well that is not enterilly true because sometimes because of my lack of planning I find myself going back to do something I had already done because well 'I forgot some step'. That is when I realised that I must learn to plan and do it good :). Easier said than done. After all those weeks that I have tought myself to plan my week and my translations, reviews and testing, I am still a mess.

I only blame myself for this, but I will not be too hard on myself I am getting there. Anyway, I still have a lot to do in terms of translating the Gnome interface and I want everything to be perfect. I had chossen ten applications to translate before the end of my internship, and if that were to happen, I need to translate atleast three applications per week, and that would be done perfectly if I planned my weeks correctly.

I had the honour of being interviewed by one of South Africas leading Zulu newspapers called Ilanga. That made my month, I was so excited because they gave me a chance to talk about my translation work including the work that I was doing for Gnome. The whole interview resulted in almost 50 facebook friend requests from Language Practitioners who are very interested in Gnome and the world of software translation. I plan to introduce them to this world that I have found to be very interesting, in a good way ofcause. That is another thing that I have to plan.

In the past week I have translated Gnome-bluetooth and Gnome-control-ceter. I have tested Gnome-Bluetooth I just need to test Gnome-control-center. With a little help from the IRC, well a lot of help from the IRC I managed to test Gnome-Utils that was a relief because I was struggling with that.

For this week I am going to be doing a lot of review work and catching up on the things that I did not plan :) and after that its translation all the way.

Have a productive Desktop Summit to everyone who is there.

Gnome Outreach program halfway report

2011-08-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

This is my halfway report and I must say that during the past month and a half I have learnt a lot of things. The applications that I have Translated are as follows:

at-spi2-atk
at-spi2-core
atk
Brasero
Cheese
Empathy
Eye of Gnome
Evince Document viewer
File-roller
gconf-editor
Gnome-contacts
Gnome-desktop
Gnome-menus
Gnome-user-share
Gnome-utils
libgnome-keyring
Tomboy
Totem
Totem-pl-parser
vte
Alacarte
Notification-daemon

I must say at the beginning I did not choose the applications using the right critiria.

Commited translations:

Alacarte
Empathy
Eye of Gnome
Gnome-menus
Notification-daemon
Totem

Like I said before I have learnt a lot of things from the Gnome community, I have learnt to ask for help and people will actually help me. I have learnt to be patient on the IRC channel because people are busy and they answer questions when they have time. I had to understand how the terminal worked, and to be more on the technical side. Even though I have studied translation I am biggining to like programming.

I must say at first I wanted to do everything from documentation to marketing, but I soon realised that translation was taking all of my time, But I got to realise that you do not have to do a big thing to market Gnome, you just need to spread the word and tell people what you are doing, get them involved, start their own translation teams, motivate them about Open Source Software. If it means you must paste a link on Facebook or Twitter do it.

Another thing that I consider marketing is sharing terminology, with other translators that are not currently involved in Gnome. By telling them that you are translating something different like Cheese and you have developed terminology for that particular application, you create curiosity and interest.

Mailing Lists:
I found this very usefull and very quick because I think people check their e-mails more than they check the IRC :)

Reviewing, Testing and Crashing
We all know that sometimes one crashes and burns, well maybe not burn but it takes a while to to rise from the ashes when your laptop has crashed because you try and find out what happened and how to prevent that from happening in the future. The first time I expirienced a crash was when I attempted to run wordfast on my previous version of Ubuntu and YEP it crashed bandly that It would not open ever again. That I understand I could easily forget about that and move on, but when your computer has locked you out and you have no access to anything, you should worry, BE VERY AFRAID.

There is usually an underlying problem and a solution to that. It would be best if you avoided what you did in the beginning. All of the above crashes can occur when you are testing your translations.

I wish that someday we will live in a Malware free world while we eat cheese and honey ;)

Installing Gnome 3

2011-07-26T23:43:00.000-07:00

I finally did it, I installed Gnome 3 and I must say I am in love with it. I started by upgrading to Ubuntu 11.4 and that took almost the whole day and then it crashed for some reason. But I finally managed to get it right and did all the steps for installing Gnome 3 and whalla it was running smoothly. I have to thank my mentor Friedel Wolf for helping me with this and guiding me through the steps.

Bugs

2011-07-19T04:07:00.000-07:00

I have learnt a lot of things in the past weeks that I have been part of this outreach program and I have realised that localization is more than just translation, its making sure that the users are happy with what they see in the application. The program must be understood in all languages and even the source text must be perfect.

At first I thought that it did not matter if I found a typo in the text that I am translating from and then it hit me like a light bulb moment, the people reading the English would be so disappointed if they see a typo when they are reading this. I asked around the IRC to see what I can do with that and someone told me to file a bug, so I did. I was so happy that I could make that kind of difference . Here is the link of the bug.

Some of you might remember my last post, I had two screenshots. One was for a string which was combined that did not read well and the other was for a string I had combined with another string without actually translating the second one (hope it makes sence, if not here is the blog with some comments). You will see that ReinoutS and Claudio suggested that I file a bug so that the string can suit my language.

Languages are all unique in their special way, can you imagine how boring it would be if languages were the same.

Testing eog

2011-07-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here are the two screen shorts for eog.

This does not read nicely

This is the fiirst test, the first part with the number representing minutes does not read well with the word minutes on the other side of the box.

This reads better

This is the perfect one, now it reads more nicely with the translated minutes on this side. But in order to do this I had to add some words on the string of the left side of the box, and I had to just ignore and not translate the minute string.

OPW Report: Localization

2011-07-11T23:51:00.000-07:00

This week I thought I would risk everything and try to do as much as I can and it was a success. I managed to translate most of the small applications and I am so proud of what I did. Last week I had already translated gdm and Tomboy so I had to review them while I was testing them.

Next I translated Totem-pl-parser and then Gnome keyrings which were like a few strings. One of the members of the Zulu Team had translated empathy and I thought I would take a look at it and do some reviews but there were some strings that were not translated so my mentor Friedel Wolff suggested that Sedric Motha might be willing to finnish it out.

I started translating Gnome panel (mostly reviewed it), Gnome utils, notification-daemon, Gnome desktop and Alacarte

I started testing Alacarte and the translation looked good. There was a missing reduced PO for Tomboy and Claud from the i18n mailing list was so kind enough to create it in a few seconds, that was super fast, thank you again.

Replacing The MO:

Well I found out this week that you cannot translate something, export it and save it as mo and when you want to test the application again save the mo in a different name. You must remove the first mo you created or replace the existing one with the changed one.

I can never stress enough that testing is so important and it helps if you are not sure about a translation. I will upload the screen shorts just above this.

OPW Report

2011-07-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

Hi all

In the past week I have done some changes on the Totem translation because there was a clash with the accelarators. This was very frustrating because sometimes I could not get myself into deciding which letters to use because as a translator you must make sure to use the right letters so that you don't cause confusion to the user.

The letters that I try to avoid are i, I, J, g, q, Q. But sometimes this can be very difficult because you might not know if the words are in the same menu or not. Testing makes this whole proccess easier.

After doing all of this I started with my gdm translation, then reviewing and then an attempeted testing. The results I have pasted on Paste Bin.

While I am trying to get the testing done, I started with the Tomboy translation.

I will have more for you later in the week.

Translating, Reviewing, Testing and all that good stuff...

2011-06-29T00:35:00.000-07:00

It has been a hell of a week, me trying to perfect every thing. Well I realised that one can never be sertisfied with ones final translation. When I look at my translation I feel like I can make it more perfect, and I won't talk about review because every time I review I feel like it is not up to scratch. I know I know, that makes me want to pull my hair and screem!!

It does not help to stick to one thing for hours :) , note everything down and make sure that the people who are going to be reading your work understand clearly what you are trying to say. It is always nice to see you work not having accelerator clashes and PrintFs, in order to do this you must review review review and review some more. You can always learn something from your review, because you see where it all went wrong, we usually catch typos and inconsistancies in the translation.

Now testing is another thing, you feel so happy to see your translation on an application that you might loose your mind and not look, check, verify, (what ever you might call it) your translations. At this stange it is where you see the long words that just don't come out right in the application, the weird way the sentences joined, because sometimes you translate one sentence that is on a different string, that can make it very difficult.

Any way the part that I love and which I think is awesome is TESTNG. All the applications are developed by incredible people!

I hope to have more for you next time, LATER.

Testing

2011-06-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

This week has been very interesting. I had to test some of the applications that I have translated, even though I have not translated Gtk some of the words were not translated. I tested two application:

Cheese
file-roller

Both applications I use almost everyday and I figured that users might also use them everyday. Like always I needed to do this through the terminal. Here is the screen short for both apps.

I had fun testing the applications, even though I know I don't have the latest ones. I would like to say thank you to the #i18n channel they really are a great help. I had a problem in converting the file into an .mo and they helped, the mailing list is good too because I learn a lot from the profesionals that use it every day.

Thank you to my mentor Friedel Wolff, who has been an inspiration and never let me give up, who showed me the way.

I am looking forward to the week ahead. I have finished translating Brasero and now I am still busy with totem. The terminology of the applications is different and by that I need to compile a terminology that suits all the applications. I am currently working on the terminology memory that I have and most of the words are there and I am adding some as I go on.

I cannot wait to get started on marketing and documentation very soon. :)

First impressions count

2011-06-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hi all

This is something I learnt. Before translating don't just start with anything with words, you must start with an application that is used everyday by the user, something that is easy. What do you see the second you switch on yur computer??? It might be a welcome screen or maybe that little box that you must enter your password in. All of these are very important and the user might appreciate it when its in his own language.

I have mentioned on my previous blogs that terminology is important and one must research the application or pragrame that is being translated. One place that might be of assistance is the software centre, it has most of the programs that you might want to install in Gnome, so starting there might help. Read about the discription of the application, what it does etc.

This week I had to download the new Virtaal 0.7.0. Well I thought it would be simple but I was wrong. I had to go to sourceforge.net to download the translate tollkit file and the Virtaal file. After that I had to go to terminal and because I had saved both files in Downloads, my command line was : cd Downloads
sudo dpkg -i translate-toolkit_1.9.0-1_all.deb

Then when checking if the installation was a success I had to type: pot2po --version. If the right version appeared then it was installed.

For Virtaal I had to type the following command : sudo dpkg -i virtaal_0.7.0-1_all.deb
and to check if the right version was installed I had to type in: virtaal --version

While installing all of this a lot of errors appeared and I had to show them to my mentor so that he could see what I see. There I was introduced to something very new, Pastebin. This is a site where you can paste anything that appears in the PPA, and then send the link of the paste to the person who can help you. It is all very interesting and very helpfull.

This week I was translating Brasero. It was not at all difficult but it was long and at some points I was struggling with terminology and I had to ask help from the Zulu mailing list. It always helps to ask people who are farmiliar with the language that you are doing. You know it does not help to translate something and not share the expirience with other people, I believe that the questions I ask help others too.

I hope that everyweek when I write my blog, someone takes something from it even if it is a sentence.

And for all of you who have just read this, YOU ARE AWSOME ;)

A Big Lesson learnt

2011-06-04T02:53:00.000-07:00

Hi all

My third week went great. I had a lot of work done and I even learnt a thing or two. After my first week I had realised that one must plan, plan, plan, well this time that is what I did. I spent a lot of hours with my mentor Friedel Wolff, discusing our next move. E-mail is the best thing since sliced bread believe me, I love it beacause you can say a mouth full, I mean three pages of information and get an instant reply.

Like I said I planed my week out perfectly and I managed to do everything that I had planed. I wanted to translate Eye of Gnome and Cheese, and that is exactly what I did. Both Programs I use every day because I take a lot of pictures, one I use to take my pictures and the other I use to view my pictures.

These two programs are not too technical at all, the terminology iuality s easy to understand, unlike things like Gtk. Quality checkes are very important in translation because your mistake might cause a computer to crash, but lucky for us someone very smart developed a system that makes sure that all the right tags, accelerators and etc, are present in the translation. Once you upload a translation that does not have some of these things, it automatically tells you that it cannot upload.

That is all I have for you this week folks. Next week I am going to be testing my translations so as to see how it all looks like.

Don't miss out!!!!!

First Time Is not A Charm (Proven)

2011-05-28T03:41:00.000-07:00

Hi all

I thought the first week will be a walk over, boy was I wrong. My mentor Friedel Wolff is a cool guy and he opened my eyes that you cannot do anything without a plan, and I learnt that the hard way. I was done doing my second translation of Evince and I started with my second translation of gtk and I realised that I did not have enough terminology.

I had to go back to the drawing board and think about a plan, do my research and come up with a schedule. This is to outline my plans for this internship so that I can reach my goal, and my goal is not only to translate Gnome but to learn all there is about it, Documentation, Marketing, the works (that means everything).

We (me and my mentor) thought about our schedule and we did chat about:

- prepare (learn about the program, target audience, etc.) ?

-terminology?

-translate -done

-review ?

-test ?

-submit

Did I mention which programs I am using?? Well here is a screen short.

This translation software is called Virtaal which means For language in Afrikaans. I have been using this program for a year now and it is great and it gets the job done.

My first priority now is translating the following:
atk
gtk- pixbuf
Gtk+.Property nicks
Gtk+. UI translations
Alacarte
Brasero
Cheese
Eye of Gnome
Viewer
Evolution
File-roller
gcalctool
gdm
gedit

I am still trying to install Gnome on my laptop because I use it more than my PC. I know I should have done that already but that is on my schedule.
And yes I am submiting on the damned lies website. I do not know what the coming week has for me but but I am taking it one day at a time.
Thank you for reading my blog please comment or give me some advice for anything. Sharp Sharp

The Eve Of The Big Day

2011-05-22T05:39:00.000-07:00

Yep you have guesed it right, it is the eve of the big day. My internship is starting tommorow and I am so excited and ready for the hard work. I cannot stress this too much, Localization is the evolution and in my opinion languages now depend on it.

Many people think that translating is so easy but they have no idea. In the next three months I am going to be inviting you in my life and telling you in debth what I am doing and what I am using to translate, the challeges the Ahha moments and the dump moments.

I will be also posting vedios on my You Tube channel because sometimes I think That I cant really express myself by writing only. I will post these videos to tell you and show you how I feel about this whole thing.

NOTE: This is not by weekly blog. I am also going to write a blog at the end of the week or better yet Tommorow and I will tell you how my first day went.

SO STAY TUNED ;)

People who will be helping me

2011-05-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

I am very happy to be a part of the Gnome outreach project because I have already seen that people are very friendly and willing to help with anything I need. I know that I will learn a lot from these people. They are very open and easy to contact and that makes my work even more pleasurable.

I will be working with Friedel wolf who will be my mentor for this coming few months. We are going to be working on documentation, localization and marketing. I cannot wait until I start. I had the pleasure of translating Gcompris which is a children's game and I loved it. Bruno who is the creator and developer of Gcompris adviced me to translate the website which will be the first place that the users of the game or maybe their parents would visit after using the game.

I have already started translating the website and I found it very complicated at first but after a few days I eased into it. It is a real pleasure to translate such a nice game that teaches children about lots of stuff that will be usefull at school.

As proud as I feel after I translate a piece of software I know that I will feel the same when I translate the Gnome interface.

The Gnome Outreach program for women

2011-05-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

I am so excited about the latest program that I am part of, its called the gnome outreach program for woman. Doing what I love I get to explore the technical side of localisation. I know many of you might think what is so exciting about that? Well I have been translating for many years now and I felt like there is nothing exciting about translating a buch of documents into isiZulu, but for the past year I have discoverd that localisation is much more exciting and I can not bring myself to do anything else.

Localisation is my latest passion and I can't imagine doing anything else, I mean the satisfaction that one gtes after translating a piece of software is priceless. People become happy when they see their computers communicating with them in their own language. That is not all many people who were not able to use technology before because they could not understand the language can easily use it with comfort. OK OK enough about me and what I am doing now, Gnome came up with this program to help many woman to get involved in localisation, programing etc.

This is really an important time for me and I thank God that I am a part of this, because like I always say verything that is appening now is history in the making. I will keep updates on my progress in the internship through my blog, so stay tuned. I have a YouTube channel so feel free to click here to see my latest videos. xoxo