Dwayne Bailey lives in Pretoria and comes from Cape Town, South Africa. In the world of free and open source software, he is well known for preaching the localisation gospel...

"The reason why you need to define goals is to ensure you don't kid yourself about what you're doing. If you're localising [GNU]Linux into Bulgarian, and you say this is being done so that Bulgarians can use a computer in their language, when in fact they all use Windows, then you need objectives that are based in reality," he says.

Your objectives could be anything. "I'm happy if someone says I'm translating Thunderbird, the email client, into Afrikaans for my 100 year old granny," jokes Bailey.

"It's all about focus. Your objective helps to focus where you put in your energies. In our organisation we found we were being pushed from pillar to post. Everyone wanted us to translate something, and there was always a good reason," he says.

"My feeling is that you have to translate stuff that focuses on the end-user. And that narrows down your scope. End-users are the people that are mostly going to benefit from whatever you do," he stresses. 

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=819