User:AxelHecht/AMS meet with Dwayne June 2009

These are notes from a chat between Dwayne and I in Amsterdam, June 24th 2009. Edits should be mostly done by Dwayne or me, comments are OK on the Discussion page.

l20n

Not got to that necessarily last night, but here's my list of things to figure out:

• plurals with symbolic names, too? DB: CLDR like name? See http://unicode.org/cldr/data/charts/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html
• UI paradigm to expose inflected placables within strings
• UI paradigm to expose variants of a localized string/object - DB: see latest Qt .ts format which seems to handle variants.

Notes to self here:

• overlay of properties of this localized object (depending on type and language, like gender) and grammar inflections. wikimedia found has some database?

Notes from Dwayne

• I'd really like to start with the simplest thing. Seems like gender related issues was the easiest and seemed to mimic current Gettext-like plurals.
• The general feeling I had is that most of the concepts can be aligned with the current plural input in gettest. The plurals as they are in l20n seem overly complex.
• I am very interested in ensuring that nothing gets exposed if nothing is defined. I.e. people see no plural interface if no plurals handling is defined for the language. Qt succeeds and PO fails on that count.

ANLoc

Unlocking anloc should be OK with using langpack/beta/official release for Firefox. Key points that I recall are

• anloc funding based on both l10n work and community building, sustainability is key lesson learned from the 2.0 days attempt.
• expose progress on the web, with
  • landing page for langpack, all.html exposure
  • no-editor-review updates on AMO langpacks
  • blog posts on progress, asking for feedback and recruiting testers, possibly MCS-based
• Offerings going beyond "shipping Firefox" as offerings, transparently done
  • African language Firefox as tool to interest locals into localization of further software
  • African language Firefox as tool to improve the web for locals
  • possibly offering opportunities like global voices to shape the local web
• Offerings are not exclusive, it should be apparent why doing that in addition gets the locals what. Not a strict priority list that's just work items.
• Kick-off meeting in Africa with Axel and locals, need to find out where, when, and what's on the agenda. Earlier is better
  • Aim for 3 teams who can help support other less technical teams
  • KIck-off to decide strategies and approaches to ensure smooth collaboration between Mozilla and ANLoc
• Aiming at 10 languages, less ain't bad
  • Need to figure out clear milestones to check in whether things work
  • Some work already done on targeted list of files based on exposure

l10n priority list

You guys have a list of well-chunked phases to do a Firefox l10n, we want to get that out into the public. Both the descriptions of the phases as well as the mapping of files to phases are in zaf's svn.

These need update for fx 3.5? --Pike 12:27, 8 July 2009 (UTC) Might want to do another full review for 3.5, I manually added them as I saw fit but didn't do the visual debug build as before. Not much changed so I think its OK. Dwayne 08:27, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

localizer and tool authors meetup

• Axel, Dwayne, Gisela on the hook
• two rounds of slow geeking of localizers showing how they work with tools, and tool authors how they think they tools should be used
• break out sessions unconference-style
• hack day?

Not sure about the size here. Should we split up Asia and EMEA? East-Asian websites make me think that the UI paradigms might be different there. Where? When? Size should probably be smaller than OTT? Got already some internal support for doing this. --Pike 12:27, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd like a hack day, definately unconference like. I think we'd get more value if we defined some use cases to which localisers would apply their tools. Mostly I'm interested in commercial localisers and their tools. Also we might want to define the outcomes, is it just to inform (that's OK) or do we define some development agenda's as an outcome. Dwayne 08:31, 14 July 2009 (UTC)