Friedel en ander frappanthede

During the Mozilla Summit, Erdal Ronahi presented a talk on Issues facing small translation teams and as usual, many of the topics caused quite a stir. This made me think about what exactly a small localisation team is.

Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla mentions on his blog that this was his favourite session. Several localisers got together on the balcony of the hotel since the power failure made the scheduled meeting room less attractive. I took a nice picture with the snow-capped mountains behind Erdal.

People pointed out how most teams are small - often just 1-4 people really translating. Yet we all know that the Irish team is significantly smaller than the French team. It is not about the number of speakers, or the net population. The number of translators don't quite explain it, and I thought I'll write down some of my ideas.

The issue with many of the teams that call themselves small, is that the small team of translators is translating several (usually large) pieces of software. The French Mozilla team has an impressive list of accomplishments. I guess few people really understood how significant their mention of translating Bugzilla is. This is some really impressive work. But they can't take the credit for French OpenOffice.org, French KDE, or anything outside the Mozilla project (to my best knowledge). However, we have to credit Kevin for the Irish translations of all of this software (as well as the GNU Translation Project). He also happens to do an Irish spell checker, hyphenation rules, grammar checker, WordNet - you get the picture. I was really inspired to finally meet Kevin!

I won't repeat the issues made by Erdal here. We experienced many of the same issues, although his category of "political issues" seemed quite severe compared to what we are used to in South Africa. It was interesting to hear my idea of 3 000 languages repeated again. This forces us to reconsider our current ways of working.