Is it really about motivation ?
A recent article in a newspaper has Chris Hofmann stating something along the lines of that the absence of any Indic language other than Gujarati and Punjabi from Firefox3 was due to the lack of “motivated” volunteers. Runa has a blog entry responding (in part) to that.
I met Chris during foss.in last year and have been interacting sporadically on mail since then on. He comes across as a person who “gets it” where “it” being the notion of collaborating within a process towards producing open source software. However, this time he did make a broad sweep at existing Indic communities and comes across as extremely rude.
The first point that would be important to note is that across various Free and Open Source Software Projects, the Indic language communities are fairly robust. So, when it comes to Firefox, the stats provided by Gervase are slightly odd. Attempting to reach out to the largest segment of language consumption communities makes sense for a web browser project since it is an artifact of immediate and visible consumption. The discussion around the stats can be found here, here and here. There is a side note from Axel who states that [he is] “generally skeptical on recruiting localization teams. To me, users benefit from a growing community, and they get hardly anything from a one-time effort”
The second point is that a large number of projects tend to fall into the box of being too much interested in localisation and not much in anything else. With the number of constitutionally accepted languages in India, it does make for a great case for herding a diverse set of cats and getting UI bits in the local language. The paradox here is that L10n is just not string crunching. A large segment of the languages have no existing equivalent terms for the technical jargon. Thus, the volunteers-translators-language_maintainers have to be careful in choosing words that convey the essence or, in some cases coming up with words that make sense. This work also includes paying close attention to branding and trademark issues (most of the FOSS trademarks are non existent in the local language) as well as ensuring a consistency of translations across teams working on various modules. If it were mere crunching of strings, theoretically it could be done by machine translations or a translation memory system too.
L10n is thus not merely translation but generation of content. And it is this content that determines how successful a FOSS project / product would be for the language communities. However, L10n is a finite state of affairs. Teams can work with focus and incrementally attain 100% localization after which it turns into a sustenance phase of translation. The projects have to figure out a way of “what next” and start putting stakes in the ground towards doing that. This is the exact place where I don’t see Mozilla or OpenOffice.org put in much work in India. Translation is a beginning towards getting (what_is_called) traction and then one has to build onto that into bigger things. A common thread of complaint that was around from foss.in last year was that the Project Days had a “condescending” approach during the presentations. A part of this can be traced to the lack of will and / or enthusiasm in getting beyond L10n into larger areas of contribution into the core of the projects.
It isn’t always the motiviation of the volunteers that cause languages to slip. Most of the time it is how the project treats its contributors. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
This is a placeholder test comment.
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sankarshan
25 Jun 08 at 8:56 pm
> Related to Axel’s comment that “[he is] generally skeptical on recruiting localization teams. To me, users benefit from a growing community, and they get hardly anything from a one-time effort”
I agree with you and have posted in several places that the mozilla project needs to redouble its efforts to recruit contributors globally. I’m a firm believer that this is critical to the long term success of the project. We have some success, and some failures trying to recruit people in the past and I think we just need to learn from the failure and putting more energy into this will help a lot. Seth Bindernagel and I are pretty committed to trying to make this happen and want to talk with others that can help.
> a large number of projects tend to fall into the box of being too much interested in localization and not much in anything else.
I don’t think this is true of the Mozilla project. Any place that we have had the time and effort to try and engage new contributors. Look back at the Mozilla project day at FOSS.in as an example. Two sessions on localization, and the rest on building applications on the mozilla platform, understanding the mozilla core technology, accessibility feature work in our core technology, web and project evangelism, and our experience with open source marketing. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/358 A lot of these sessions were hosted by active contributors from India in each of the specific areas. Beyond the project day we also held a hacking session where Myk and I worked with Anant Narayanan and a few others to go through the process of looking at and fixing a core mozilla bug, and getting the patch attached to a bug for peer review. His patch was accepted later in the week and made it into Firefox 3. Anant is here in Mt. View this summer working on an internship in Mozilla Labs before going back to grad school in the fall. Efforts like this are not uncommon and it sounds like its the kind of stuff you would like to see from Mozilla and across other projects. Me too!
The kind of things we are doing at Mozilla and we agree are important.
I didn’t get the kind of complaint feedback that you mentioned that was floating around about FOSS.in so if you or anyone else wants to post here or mail me, seth, and mary colvig about what they saw as negative parts about Mozilla’s participation at the conference we would be happy to hear about those things so we can improve.
I’ve also posted to some comments made over on runab’s blog on some some ideas she had there and I’m interested in feedback on those too.
-chofmann
Reply
Chris Hofmann
26 Jun 08 at 12:14 am
Hi Sankarshan:
Your post got me thinking about how so many members of Mozilla’s community have done to create a thriving Mozilla project in India (outside of just l10n). We’ve done quite a bit and I know Chris Hofmann can comment even more on those efforts.
In this post, you do call out Chris for making sweeping comments that were very rude. We both know those were misquotes by the reporter, as Chris mentioned in the dev-l10n mailing list the morning the article printed. As you mention, Chris “gets it”…you won’t find a more dedicate member to the Mozilla community than Chris. He is passion is pretty contagious.
But, I thought I would write a more general post about Mozilla l10n process and community.
Here it is: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2008/06/25/199/
Thanks for your post.
Reply
seth b
26 Jun 08 at 4:40 am
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