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Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:36:51 +0000
From: Michael Bauer <fios@akerbeltz.org>
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: About the Former Native Language projects
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Hi folks,

I admit to mostly lurking but kinda feel compelled to chip in at this 
point. First off, I'm "just a translator", I came to OO late in the day 
to resucitate the Scottish Gaelic localization which had fallen format. 
I have no coding skills, at least none at the level needed to contribute 
code, so I consider my skills in translation my contribution. As such, I 
usually have little interest in the direction projects such as OO, 
Mozilla w/e take, code-wise or politically, except for trying to promote 
translator-friendly localization processes.

The impending rift and eventual split took me completely by surprise. 
Literally. One day I had been translating away in Pootle, the next day 
it was dead and it took a lot of googling to eventually figure out what 
had been going on. I'm just glad I had taken a backup the day before, I 
don't know how many nascent projects have had their entire work frozen 
on Pootle since. Which is why I felt a little irked by the suggestion 
someone made that interested NL projects could "come forward". If it 
hadn't been for someone's blog post I came across eventually, I *still* 
wouldn't know that OO had "shifted" to Apache. I suspect very few NL 
projects will have come forward because for a long time it was not 
obvious to people not hooked into the develpment mailing lists 
(conjecture, mylord) that that's what happened. Apart from spam, nothing 
has ever been posted on the l10n list which was the only list I had 
subscribed to for the above reasons.

So if "we're" supposed to step forward, perhaps someone should let the 
l10n list subscribers know?

My main concern are the Gaelic users, however few those may be, who are 
still stuck on 3.01 and who know nothing of this break, apart from the 
fact that the extensions site has been going offline regulary. So I'd 
like to find some way of completing the localization - which should be 
relatively easy as I completed it over on LO, so they can finally update 
to whatever version is next.

Salude e trigu,

Michael

And incidentally, translation *is* a technical skill - it just doesn't 
involve code dancing across the screen ;)