Open Stack

Hi all,

Since the Folsom summit I've been quietly pushing forward on the translation/internationalization management front. This email has two main parts:

1. The need for management and leadership around translation, internationalization, and localization in OpenStack.
2. Tools to support the translation efforts.

In reverse order:

Tools
====

I know people have strong feelings and concerns on which tools are best and which features matter most, so I've put together a comparison matrix.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqevw3Q-ErDUdFgzT3VNVXQxd095bFgzODRmajJDeVE

It features our current solution (Launchpad) and the top two contenders people have asked me to look at (Pootle and Transifex). The list of features for comparison contains the concerns voiced at the summit session, those voiced by the community to me, those voiced by the infrastructure team, and my own experience working on translations for other open source projects (such as Django).

Having worked with all three tools, I would strongly suggest Transifex, particularly given that we as a community have to do almost no work to maintain it, it's the only tool that supports OpenStack as a "project hub" with shared teams and management, and it offers us a strong crowdsourced translation community.

You can check out my current efforts in testing OpenStack on Transifex here:

https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/openstack/

That has all the Horizon and Nova translations (that have any significant progress on them) imported, the teams and translation memories shared under the OpenStack Projec Hub umbrella, and the source translation resource files linked to their github sources. Feel free to try using it.

Management
===========

As a preliminary measure, I have created a Launchpad group called "openstack-translators" in case we need to track translation efforts within the community separately. If nothing else it can be a meeting place for people interested in/concerned with translation, internationalization, and localization in OpenStack. It may not be used in the long run, but it seemed like a good place to start coalescing.

Community Leadership
==================

As per Thierry's call for volunteers, I will throw my hat in the ring to spearhead translation efforts in OpenStack for the time being. I may not be the best linguist, but I do have a good understanding of the technical and management issues involved, and am happy to help bring together and guide the community in this area. I've also got familiarity with all the core project codebases and work primarily on Horizon (which has the greatest translation burden) so I'm in a good place to ensure consistency and prod at people who don't fall into line... ;-)

All the best,

    - Gabriel