Hi guys!
We know how frustrating it can be when your favorite distribution is not localised in your language, or half-translated, and that’s why we translators aim to provide a fully translated Mageia with as many supported languages as possible.
We also know that Mageia is a community-driven project, and therefore the contributors try to communicate as much as they can through the blog, the website or the wiki. Still, those bits of information should not be reserved to the English-speaking users, and we must translate this content to reach as broad an audience as possible.
You got it: as an international Linux distribution, one of the values of Mageia is to be accessible to everyone, despite the barriers of language. That is the purpose of Mageia’s internationalisation team (i18n).
So, you always wanted to return something to the OpenSource community as a whole but couldn’t think of a way to do it?
You can read English texts easily and you have fun writing well-phrased texts in your native language? Or you are not confident enough to translate from English but you would like to review your peers’ translations to make sure they are properly phrased and spelt?
If this is you, look at the translators’ wiki page and contact the i18n team via its mailing list or on #mageia-i18n on Freenode’s IRC network.
Feel free to hunt down the i18n team leader Oliver Burger – obgr_seneca on IRC – and his deputy Rémi Verschelde – Akien on IRC. They will always be happy to answer any of your questions.
There’s so much to translate. There are thousands of packages that come with any distro, and the average package has thousands of messages (my experience with translating is it usually takes a couple days working full-time to translate a single package, and that’s not including the maintenance aspect). It’s just too big of a task for anyone to make a 100% translated OS.
Hello! I want to translate the Mageia software and pages (not including wiki) to Esperanto. Would you like to help me?
You are of course right. No one person can translate the whole software included into a distribution. And we don’t try that.
Responsible for the translation of the applications included into Mageia is the upstream project.
Every one of at least the more important projects does have its own i18n team and it would be nonsense for us to redo their work again.
We at Mageia’s i18n team are responsible for Mageia’s own tools, this is the installer, the draktools, some Mageia specific things in system-config-printer.
And we are proud to say that we have a 100% translation rate of these in some of the teams. That doesn’t mean, those teams are better then others, mostly they just have more people…
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