Free yourself to do the right thing

We had a Sahana localization sprint session organized in India and over the IRC, for contributors from other parts, on 1st November 2008 from 11 AM to 6 PM. It was exciting to see people turning out on time and eventually participating with some sheer amount of discussions going on in #sahana, the project’s official IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

The main agenda was to increase the localization statistics, ensuring quality of translations at the same time, of Hindi and other Indic languages. And we ended up adding on contributions to *Hindi* and *Bengali*.

Bangla contribution was kicked off this day with 3 people contributing namely:

[name - country/team - IRC nickname]:

• Arindam Ghosh – India – makghosh/arindam
• Mahay Alam Khan – Bangladesh – maktrix
• Subhodip Biswas – India – subhodip

They were able to take up the statistics to 6% on the day for both bn and bn_IN. And at the end of the day we got some good news as well! Mayah Alam Khan got the news that he is going to be a father! after the session. We wish him and his wife a hearty congratulations on this beautiful news on the sprint day!

All of them started working on bn_IN first and we merged the same files to bn_BD which would later be modified as per the Bangladesh locale.

For Hindi we had the following people, including me [ajuonline] , working:

[name - country/team - IRC nickname]:

• Rajesh Ranjan – India – Rajesh_Ranjan
• Nandeep Maali – India – n9986 *
• Jeba Singh Emmanuel – India – graydot *

The final statistics for Hindi was taken to 86% from the earlier 82% with some quality check done by installing Sahana with the Hindi language pack and browsing through.

* While the internet at the venue stopped working as soon as we started because of the server problem which couldnt be fixed by the end, the 3 people at the venue, me, Nandeep & Jeba were not able to key in any translations.

I ran off the Internet using my cellphone’s GPRS connection and did the review while Rajesh worked on the files. I would like to specifically mention that the earlier status of 82% was a result of significant contributions from all of us Just that this particular day we could not do much.

We had visitors to the channel from the Indian community to check out and talk to us and also talk to others about the activity going on. We had a Gujarati language translator, Kartik Mistry [India - kart_ ], sign up on this day too. So we hope to get Gujarati translations taken care of soon!

Special Thanks to:

• Gora Mohanty of Sarai, New Delhi and a prominent face of the FOSS world in India, for hosting us and help spread the Sahana message.
• Dominic König – Our translation server admin,  Sahana PMC member and a friend , for being present there to assist with issues, instructions and to guide us. He was up at 7 AM in the morning, as per his time zone, for the event!! Thank you Dominic, I must say you rock!
• The contributors working on the translation, all who are in someway or the other are active FOSS contributors.
• People who helped spread the message about Sahana translation to the mailing lists and IRC channels in the Indian community, especially from ##linux-india.

The communication channels used were the mailing lists and IRC Channel. The log of the threads and chat specific to this event can be found here:

• IRC Logs – Part 1 and Part 2 [ The conversation started at "21:03:12" as per the Part 1 log file. Do a CTRL+F of 21:03:12 to reach there. ]
• Sahana Localization Mailing List – Part 1 and Part 2.

Conducting such an activity did help spread awareness about “What Sahana is?” and “Localization Needs of Sahana” in the Indian community for sure apart from kickstarting the Indic localization activities, and we have been receiving comments on people talking about Sahana in India and willing to contribute. So I am looking forward to have more contributions from India to this noble project.

Sahana is a useful piece of software and translations of it in various Indian languages is still something to be completed. So in case you are willing to contribute to it, do join in the project mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/sahana-localization and help translate Sahana!

Report by Dominic König : http://edrs.nursix.org/?p=31

This post on Sahana Blog: http://talksahana.com/2008/11/03/sahana-india-localization-sprint-report/