Re: [babel-dev] How to engage with professional translators on Babel

[Kit Lo <kitlo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Babel's design is focused on leveraging
the Eclipse community's efforts to translate all the Eclipse projects.
We have hundreds or thousands of individual contributors around the world
to contribute translations. The model is a little different from large
companies using professional translators to perform the translations.

Professional translators are usually
assigned a set of files to be translated in a period of time. They usually
have some tools to compute the "new or changed" delta files between
2 shipments. Depending of the size of the project to be translated, 2 or
3 translators may be assigned to translate 1 language, where they can communicate
among themselves very well.

Although Babel is not designed with
professional translators in mind, but I believe we have most of the tools
available in Babel for professional translators to perform their jobs.
- Babel zips up all the translatable
.properties files and make them available from the download page. Anyone
can compare any 2 copies of the zips with some shareware tools to compute
the "new or changed" delta files.
- The "new or changed" delta
files should give professional translators some ideas of the translation
efforts.
- The "babel-translators"
mailing list and the "language glossary" (French example: http://wiki.eclipse.org/French_Glossary)
are some of the channels the translators can communicate and discuss translation
questions
- One thing I see missing in Babel currently
is the ability to lock certain files so that other translators will not
waste time translating the same files. We certainly can think of implementing
this enhancement.

Comments from other professional translators
are welcome.

Kit Lo
IBM Eclipse SDK Globalization Technical Lead
Eclipse Babel Project Co-lead

"Antoine Toulme" <antoine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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12/17/2008 06:24 PM

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Subject	[babel-dev] How to engage with professional translators on Babel

Hi folks,

I'd like to know how Babel does when it comes to engaging
with professional translation companies.

In particular, it seems a professional translator would
be particularly interested into the number of strings she would have to
translate. 

There is also the question of scope, where the work starts
where it ends. There I suppose we could tell a translator to translate
that project and not that one, etc.

Last but not least, I am wondering whether the Babel interface,
as of now, is good enough for a Babel translator, or if translation companies
would just refuse to work with it.

Kit, it sounds like you have a solid background on this,
do you have some kind of process to give a quote to a translation company
?

Thanks,

Antoine

-- 
http://www.lunar-ocean.com/blog
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