Thursday, October 4, 2007

Surprised (in a good way)

I'm in between two semesters in the university (second degree in CS), which means I have some spare time. These times shows you how much free time you had before you thought about the degree. So I try to do something useful with my time, but as stated in my previous post - I'm bored. So I started contributing to an open-source project, and upgraded my Ubuntu, and played a lot in WoW, but that's not enough. So I decided to help translating open-source project to the holy language (Hebrew, that is). My first step was to go to launchpad, and look for a project that needs translation. Then I got surprised. It seems that almost every project was already translated or being translated by someone. I didn't realize that I was going to have to dig until I find a project which both interests me, and needs translation. Finally, I found soundconverter, which I both like (and use, of course) and no one had translated it, yet. I must say that this job is not as easy as it seems, since Hebrew lacks some English technical concepts, and the application contains much more strings than I though it would.

As for another surprise. I just finished teaching my mom how to use Google and using the browsers Favorites/Bookmarks. Not an easy task, but very satisfying.

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    I don't know what you're talking about - regarding not being able to find a project to translate. There are hundreds of them, half backed, review needed, half translated projects just laying around in launchpad. All you have to do is pick one: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/+lang/he

    A translators' work is not easy. Indeed.
    That's why we use our mailing list, translation forums, our wiki page (You may find some resources here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuHebrewTranslators ), online dictionaries and other means to coordinate and ask for help in translating the hard ones.

    Note that a member in the translators team doesn't always have to do translation work. He can also do some review work which is very important and (usually) less time consuming.


    Shlomil.

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