Je Hais Le Printemps

[EDIT : IMPORTANT - COMMENTS ARE BACK]

From july 22nd-23rd, I've attended to the LugRadio Live, and I had the guts to ask M. Shuttleworth a few questions after his talk about the "N" big challenges of FOSS. And I've been happy to see that challenge #8 was related to internationalisation and translation issues.

So, here are Mark Shuttleworth few words about translating teams, and especially the french one. Sorry for the poor audio quality, but I ain't got a Nokia 770 with an USB mike and Jokosher running as my portable home studio.

Help needed

I've tried to transcript the interview, in order to translate it into french for my french readers. It's not quite perfect, so I put it here. If you have remarks and bug fixes, contact me through mail or jabber (brunobord@jabber.org).

Bruno: You were talking earlier about the challenge #8, about translation. and about the translation platform. Can you have a few words for the French translation, and for all the foreign countries translation works?
Mark: Bonjour Bruno.
B: Yeah, bonjour.
M: Translation is one of the key areas where free software has a compelling advantage over proprietary software, and it's one of the area where i think we should all be investing and collaborating in. It's also one of the areas where developpers who don't have a tremendous amount of time or don't yet have a tremendous amount of exposure or experience in the free software world can make a very big contribution. What we are working on is trying to create infrastructure to allow people to contribute to translations for upstream projects and for ubuntu from anywhere in the world, just using a web browser, and that's part of our launchpad.net infrastructure, and i'd like wery much to see upstreams prioritizing translation as a key feature, so whenever people starting an new free software project, from the very beginning, to trying find someone to join the project who could think about translation, and help them to structure their projects in such a way that it's easy to translate so it can be used by people in any language. In their home language.
B: Yeah, because, one of the major block, drawback of linux is that people usually say: "Well, Linux is all in english" ; and french people suck usually at speaking english.
M: Well I think we all have a right to use tools in our own language. It's raisonnable for us to prefer tools in our ... in our language. The good news is that the french community is very active at software translation, so i see that there is a big french uptake of rosetta and launchpad. What would be awesome is if the fr comm could potentially start helping other language comm to get themselves organised as efficiently as it's picked up by the French. It's clear that the french have figured out how the best to do this, how to organised themselves, how to do socially how to do what take one's experience off ; it would be great if they could actually lead other translation projects for other language, so the other countries could get some [??] side effects.
B: what about doc? doc trans is really important too. Do you think it's not just translating the manual, or maybe building up tut, or translating tutorials in your own language? Which one is most important?
M: You absolutely agree it's most important. it's more difficult to translate doc than code, because the items that need translation aren't as separated from one another. So when we translate an application it can really be broken down into a series of small strings ; and they need to be a consistant approach take to that trans, but it can be done in pieces. Whereas with the documents, you know you have elements of style, elements of presentation and formats...
B: ... and graphics...
M: yes graphics... That make it much much more difficult. We don't really have good tools at this stage to manage that, as far as I'm aware. certainely i think rosetta and launchpad won't have to be used to manage this because they're not ideal for that.
B: Maybe that's time to build a tool to make it easy to translate...
M: Yes, what you need is to keep track of what hasn't been translated and where work needs to be done. in many cases this is the problem is that people don't know what work they can help with.
B: Thank you very much. Now can you say a few words in french, just a few words.
M: Huh. Unfortunately my russian is much better than my french
B: Oh go ahead, go ahead, I'll translate it anyway.
M: Well do you speak russian as well ?
B: Absolutely not!
[Laughs]
M: [??]
B: ok, just say. Just say after me "bonjour à la communauté francophone".
M: "Bonjour à la communauté francophone"
B: All right, great, thank you, thank you very much.
[Matt laughs]

[Edit - 2006-08-04@09:07] : Transcript updated thanks to Thomas Bouquet.