Translators needed?

[José Suárez]

Maybe the best thing we could do was joining efforts by creating localization 
(translation) teams/groups which consisted of all the volunteers that want to 
translate the apps' messages into a particular language, via a wiki or 
collaborative page/site.
IMO I think this would be _very_ useful because, no matter how good a user's 
translation skills are, there is always a better way of doing something, and 
by combining all the users' efforts and skills better ideas always come up.
I have done some translation jobs and I have always felt that sometimes there 
is just "a better word" for the word/expression to translate in the other 
language that could explain the meaning better, but, you know,... you just 
have that word on the tip of your tongue but can't get that word!
Other important problem is the 'fixed lenght strings': by that I mean strings 
of text that can't exceed a number of characters and if in the translation 
you exceed that number of characters the the translated string shows cut on 
the app message box. I don't know if there would be some of those in OpenMoko 
but, if so, the best way of solving that is by collaborative translation 
(IMO).


An idea about the translation project schedule has just come to my mind. Here 
is the possible roadmap I've thought about:

1) Maybe the first stage could be creating different translation proposals 
(maybe one per volunteer, if possible. Partial translations could be also 
accepted).

2) Then there could be a second stage which consisted in the merger of the 
translations, without rejecting any of the particular translation proposals. 
(Maybe we could end up with 2 or 3 different translation proposals for a 
given text string, but variety makes projects richer, doesn't it? ;) )

3) Following the second stage there could be a 'per team/group' discussion 
(friendly, of course ;) ) on finding possible workarounds/solutions for 
particular "controversial" strings. The result should be obtaining version 
0.1 of the whatever_language translation.

4) Fine tuning is always a must... So the final stage could be a "bug hunting 
period" and the suggestion of some general improvements in the translation.


Can anyone find a better solution for the process?

All the best,
José