Saturday, December 03, 2011

Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

2 comments:

Thomas said...

Hi,

you could create a nice looking web application for collaborated community based translation.
I think this would minimise the barrier to help as everybody could contribute without installing extra software, joining a mailing list, contacting the developers, etc.
So it would be a low cost task to fix a bug or translate some missing strings.

Best regards,
Thomas

Albert Astals Cid said...

@Thomas: This has been discussed again and again and again and we do not need someone that comes and translates 1 string, probably not even following the language style or using the correct terminology, what we need is people that commits to translate 1000 words, minimizing the effort to join is not going to give you that, only passing by translators that actually hinder more than help.