I am member of HanoiLUG, SaigonLUG, and Ubuntu-VN, mostly as a
lurker. Hope I'm allowed to be with you guys on Debian l10n-vi
project.
Well, this is awesome! :-) Welcome onboard!
Although I'm using Debian and Gentoo GNU/Linux at the moment, I have
been a Ubuntu translator and packager for a while (find me on
Launchpad). So I have some suggestions to the project before going
into progress.
- l10n and i18n are different processes. A lot of people have
mistaken about this. The short reason is that i18n help people
display the messages in their own languages, but l10n includes the
process of *translating and adapting* them, e.g. modifying the
whole encoding system, fonts, ...
- For Ubuntu translators: Translating Ubuntu is very easy since we
have a web tool (hosted on Launchpad) to help us translating in a
collaborating way, thus makes the translation process faster. For
Debian, according to what I know, we have to translate each file,
each package, and commit them separately. Very time consuming and
lots of essential mistakes.
- Debian has a huge repository, so before going into details, we
have to delineate a set of packages we are going to focus on
translation.
I truly appreciate your input. I'll reply about it tmr though, right now, I'm sleepy. However, I must say that I agree with your 3rd idea. ;-)
@An Nguyen: We have met on SFD 2010, I was the guy from OLPC-VN in
Hanoi :-).
Yup, of course I know who you are. We actually talked via the AUF visioconférence system. :-)
P.S. Should we have an IRC channel for fast discussion and direct
meeting?
IMHO, #vnluser maybe good enough for this. I'll ask CuaDua and nobawk about this. Since the community in Vietnam is not really big, so we'd better gather together as much as possible so we can spread the words much easier.