Tim Foster's Weblog

Over the last while, there's been plenty of discussion of software that Sun may or may not be open sourcing (I'm not privy to those conversations, so don't ask me >)

I believe though, that doing open source is more than just sharing source code - it's sharing everything : release engineering, testing, documentation, and yes - translations ! We do a lot of translation of open source projects at Sun, and do contribute those translations back to the various communities involved, as far as I'm aware. One area I'd like to see us do more work in, is that of being more proactive in the ways that open source communities could reuse these translations in other projects.

For example, we already produce localised builds of GNOME, StarOffice, Mozilla and Netbeans/SunONE Studio (or whatever it's called today). Internally, we have a home-grown translation memory system that allows us to share translations between these open source projects and also Solaris, Java and other Sun products.

It strikes me though, that we really ought to be doing more to help out the existing communities to try and share their translations between each other : maybe this is being done already by the communities involved, I don't know - does the fr-FR translation of "File->Open" in GNOME match that in Mozilla and OpenOffice, and if not, why not ?

I'm hopefully giving a talk at this years GUADEC conference (a conference for GNOME Users And Developers) on the way we do translations at Sun, concentrating on the use of the XLIFF and TMX localisation standards.

Would people working on various open source projects be interested in working together to share in some of the tools work we're doing perhaps even helping to host a large translation memory (a database of strings and their translations) so that new open source projects can quickly produce translations ? I'd be interested in hearing from you...

If you have any thoughts on this either way (maybe the existing processes are good enough, and I'm imagining problems where there are none - I dunno), drop me a line - I have talked to some folks on gnome-i18n about this before, and those guys do seem to be interested in the concept, I'm just curious as to what other groups are doing in this area.

An article I contributed to about XLIFF can be seen at :http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/xliff.html