vertaal"stichting" in Finland

[Reinout van Schouwen]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=100834&cid=8596322

 It sounds incredible to me that Microsoft actually tries to get
governments to translate their software for them free, while Open Source
localization groups are desperate with getting governments to participate
or provide even little funding.

Perhaps we would need to organize better? For some time, I've been trying
to find out if there exists a collective effort for localizing open source
software, which covers both all softwares and all locales. Currently, we
seem to have two types of localization efforts:  software-specific and
national efforts. For example, the major OSS softwares, such as KDE,
Gnome, and OpenOffice have organized translation efforts. Then there are
some national efforts. For example, in Finland, we have organized a joint
national effort [www.iki.fi] as a working group, which gathers the
different Finnish localization teams together and aims to provide them
publicity, recruiting, funding, other resources, and generally a channel
for cooperation. We currently have KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Debian, and
some other translation teams working together on common issues such as
quality, vocabulary, and tools. I have noticed that there exists also some
other national or language-specific efforts, such as for Arabic and
South-African languages. However, I haven't found any cooperation effort
between these national efforts, where we could participate. So, what I'm
looking for is a universal effort that covers both all the different
localization projects for different softwares, and for the different
languages (or nationalities). There exists some more-or-less generic
efforts, such as the Translation Project, but those which I've seen cover
only a limited set of software products (TP covers some 100 but it's still
rather limited). If you know about such an universal cover effort, please
tell me. Otherwise, perhaps the time is ripe for starting to plan for such
an effort. I'm not talking about any massive organization, just a loose,
light-weight organization that would serve as a center for information
sharing and cooperation. Well, basicly a well-structured web portal would
suffice. I begun to wonder about this last fall, when I started designing
a portal-based information system for the Finnish national localization
effort and did preliminary organization analysis. I noticed that many of
the tools we would need would also be useful for others. Well, of course
it may be difficult to unify such tools between different efforts, as
different efforts have their own preferences, but it would be nice to get
to know what other efforts need and what they could contribute. Our
Finnish national effort is still slowly forming, but we are quite active
in certain areas such as quality assurance. We have had one joint workshop
event so far and have planned to have one twice a year (next one is
scheduled for May). Last year, we produced a 26 page report about the
status of different Finnish localization projects. We have also tried to
make contacts with translation departments of universities. Our effort for
getting funding is still in infancy. We would very much like to share
"patterns" of organizing national and software-specific efforts and
serving the actual translation teams. So, is there anyone interested in
world domination?

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