Hi all,
regarding Mike's comments:
- Non-English-speaking countries are
the fastest areas of growth in Eclipse downloads.
- Non-English-speaking countries
already account for more than 35% of the downloads.
It would be interesting to know the download
stats of the NL packs. Because it could
be that although non-English-speaking countries download a lot and grow fast,
they might be fine with an English Only version of Eclipse / Europa. I guess
that's the standpoint of WindRiver - although we do sell in non-English-speaking
countries a lot, all our products have always been English-only so far and
everyone's been fine with that.
It would also be interesting how a party that's using NL
packs feels about a situation where some parts of Eclipse are
translated but other parts (non-Europa-plugins, ...) are not
translated. Would they live with the "mixed" version? Or invest
into translating the non-NL-parts? Or live with an English-only version rather
than having a mixed one?
Finally, with respect to the Translation Project. When I
got the minutes right, the discussion is who'd be OK with investing some
resources into creating an infrastructure for doing translations in the
Community, more than actually doing the translations themselves. Sine it looks
like Paul knows about the Wiki-based Community-based translation process for
Aptana, and Paul recently joined Dash as a committer, I'm wondering
how much effort he thinks it would be to do Wiki-based translation
under Dash. I assume that doing the infrastructure in an existing
project would be less effort than doing the infrastructure in a new
project.
Cheers, -- Martin Oberhuber Wind River Systems,
Inc. Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm
Planning Council, Here are the results of our call on Friday
regarding translating Europa and a translations project in general. Attending
were: Rich Gronback, Jess Garms, Wenfeng Li, Patt Huff, David Williams, John
Graham, Masoyuki Jwanaga, Doug Schaefer, Doug Gaff, Mike Milinkovich and at
least one other person whose name I did not catch.
The advance goal of
this call was that, having received the size estimates of the translation
effort for the various projects over the previous week, we were going to
report back on our conversations with our collective employers about whether
they were willing to put resources into translating Europa and/or a
translation project that will help the community translate Europa and future
simultaneous releases.
This goal was only met in the negative: Doug and
Doug stated that Wind River and QNX were not planning to provide resources to
translate/a translations project. Doug Gaff said that he would ask around, but
did not expect a positive reply. Everyone else (with three exceptions below)
remained silent - unfortunately, silence implies the negative and thus
everyone (with three exceptions below) has stated that their companies are not
going to provide resources.
The three exceptions are: BEA, Actuate, and
IBM. These three are having a conference call next week and will report back
to this list. It remains uncertain at this time whether these three companies
will volunteer the resources necessary to do either the translations or the
translations project, but at least they are continuing the conversation. It
was _very_ clear that none of these three was willing to do the work on their
own - the question only remains whether they are willing to share the work
without further help from other Eclipse members.
John Graham also
suggested that someone might find a third-party company to do the work, get a
bid, and then the EMO could ask around if the member companies are willing to
co-fund the contract. We had no volunteers to do that initial "find a
third-party company" step.
Mike explained that we should be very, very
clear about the situation:
- Non-English-speaking countries are the fastest areas of growth in
Eclipse downloads.
- Non-English-speaking countries already account for more than 35% of the
downloads.
- There will NOT BE any translations of Europa projects if we do not have
a translations effort/project.
- Someone needs to step up and lead this project or it's not going to
happen. Period.
Notes taken and posted by
Bjorn
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