Yesterday I had a chance to attend MashPit. After much deliberation over what should be tackled, a “self organizing” team that included Cal Henderson, Matt Mullenweg, and myself decided to wrestle collaborative localization. It’s one of those problems that doesn’t get much love because when a team (open source or not) has to tackle it, they do whatever minimum is necessary to make the pain go away. Larger companies just pay bucket-loads to make it disappear.
Clearly, we need something better. Something shared, something in-situ…something usable by real, live people.
In just shy of 4 hours, we went from a bunch of drawings to a working, demo-able system that will let people quickly post translations to a central location, (eventually) import from and export to other localization formats like gettext, and provide developers with a straightforward way to generate pages that let anyone donate translations.
We don’t have a name for the project yet, so suggestions are welcome, and public (anonymous) SVN is available from:
http://svn.dojotoolkit.org/langp/
We’ve got a lot of work left to do, but a translation-commons is something that everyone needs. Time to make it happen.
12 Comments
Sounds like fun! My checkout is croaking though. The first include in init.php should be include(realpath($inc_dir.’/../config.php’)); to resolve the relative path. I’m missing a templates_c directory. Boy oh boy, I want this to work! :-)
Suggestions for the project’s name:
Pinketta – Boxetta – Flaxetta – Irisetta
—–
Based on Rosetta ; and a rose, by any other name… would still be a flower ;-)
See -> http://www.earthlypursuits.com/FlwrsPer/FlwrName.htm
A couple of us guys at Technorati had this same idea about a year ago and even got a domain. GetText.org. I can pony it up for the cause if ya want. Email me if you’re interested.
What’re the db table schema?
Let me check on that. We should have it in SVN to be sure.
BabelZilla is such a collab l10n site, but it’s specific to Moz stuff.
BabelText? (harking babelfish?)
But still, shouldn’t there be a database table scheme available somewhere?
yeah, but I can’t seem to hit the DB from the box that Matt was hosting the demo from. *sigh*
I’ve tried to email Matt to get it, but no luck so far. Without the table scheme there’s not much use in the SVN ;)
I caught matt on IM today and was able to get a dump of the DDL. It’s now checked in as langp.sql.
Regards
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This is quite clearly in need of the name “Langpad”
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[…] Yesterday I participated in an event called Mashpit with some interesting folks and with Cal and Alex built a version 0.1 of a translation manager, the idea being that people can submit translations for phrases in a moderated wiki-like manner, allowing for community translation of projects large or small. It was a lot of fun and very rewarding to get something functional done in such a short period of time. […]