It all started when someone, who by his own admission is not a native speaker of Bangla/Bengali language, wanted to transcribe Sanskrit Shlokas (hymns) in the Bangla script into a digital format and requested for modifications in a in-use keymap. After having responded to a mail thread now crossing the 80+ mark, I wanted to step back, summarize and review this entire situation. Just this morning, I was speaking with a colleague about how often and unknowingly we are drawn into stressful situations which make us lose focus from the task at hand. I was reminded of this, by a rather unfortunate turn of events that happened, on a mailing list of much repute. The graphiti and the adamant proponent of this theory is a legend that a generation would remember. If one grew up in the city of Kolkata in the 1980s and 90s, they would not be unfamiliar with the above graphiti planted on innumerable walls and lamposts. 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 A review session for all the translated content.Not just for Gaia, but for other projects as well. There is still more to do and the translation has to continue.Pre-decided work assignments to start things off ( this was rather hastily put up).( Discussed many times earlier, and comments can be directed to the earlier post) A simpler tool to track the translation, through *one* interface.Workflow was established to ensure the committers were being notified of files ready to go into the repository.Commits were immediately made into the repository.Faster turnaround of translation -> reviews -> revision.( Does not include the files still being reviewed) At Mozilla Dashboard – 39% translated.
All it needed was an IRC channel and a fundamental understanding of the content translation and delivery cycle. 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. 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. Of the 5 translators, two participants were very new to translation work, so it was essential to help them with constant reviews.
Two of us had commit rights on the Mozilla mercurial repository. The initial hour was spent to set up the repository and to decide how we were going to manage the tasks between ourselves. We used the IRC channel # and gathered there from 11 in the morning to 4 in the evening. 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. The new translators were given links to the files they could translate, and send over to the mailing list/mentor for review. However, the reigning confusion with the tool of choice, was not easy to workaround. The Firefox OS seemed like a popular project with them that was also easy to translate. The last few weeks saw some volunteers introducing themselves to participate in translation and localization. 29th December 2012 we had a translation sprint for Ankur India with specific focus on Gaia localization.