Till date, we have seen many efforts towards standardizations of translations, like Glossaries, Dictionaries, FUEL, etc. across Open Source projects and language communities. However, one question always come to my mind why translations are not yet standardized even though these many efforts are already in place!
Tried to figure out the possible reasons, like
- not all languages have efforts being made in the direction of standardization
- not all languages have glossaries, dictionaries, fuel, etc.
- not all translators follow standard terms of translations being used in Glossaries, Dictionaries, FUEL, etc
- not all translators use terminology management tools
- not all translators spend time standardizing translations
it could be any of the above. But there is another important issue I just realized that we have different group of translators working for almost every different open source project for this matter.
Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/Teams
Debian: http://lists.debian.org/i18n.html
OpenSuse: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Localization_Teams
Gnome: http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/
KDE: http://i18n.kde.org/teams-list.php
XFCE: http://i18n.xfce.org/wiki/language_maintainers
Mozilla: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams
Openoffice: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Languages
Robot Project (for various other important open source applications): http://translationproject.org/team/
Pidgin: http://developer.pidgin.im/l10n/
and many more…
So, one of the major problems I see towards standardization of translations is: there are more than one translation community per language, which leads to different standards being followed in various open source projects. As a result, there is no standard translation terminology across (and within) open source distributions. This issue is obvious for closed source projects as well, but could be resolved for Open Source projects at least by,
- integration of language communities of each language
- working together collaboratively
- following same standard, even if language communities decide to run separate
Not sure, how is it going to be possible to implement any of the above, but there should be some way to fix this issue.
Thanks!
Ankit