First let me give you a brief background of the current Arabic translation status, We have 167 contributor, 266742 untranslated string which make %64.72, 8847 strings that needs review.
I’m putting the following assumptions to build sort of road-map, one crucial way to way to boost the translation process is to get more contributors (I’ll talk about how we can double the number later), lets say we can double our contributors 334 lets assume that 300 of them will translate 30 strings a day and others will review the translation that makes 9000 translated string a day on the other side each reviewer will review 60 string a day which should be around 2000 reviewed string a day.
Having a 300 contributor translating to translate 266742 string would take 30 days to push our status 100% translated (which is kind of a dream) in the same month we will have 60000 string reviewed with 206742 strings that needs a review and by the way I’m putting the worst case scenario here which is we have to review all of translated strings
and later if we were able to keep the same spirit we will have all translation reviewed within 103 days.
Of course we still have to find a way to export our translation to the upstream and hopefully make this automated in a way similar to Upstream bugs linkage.
Now, How to get more contributors?
People would do things for free if they have passion for it, if they need it, if it’s fun doing it and finally if they are making some money out of it.
Passion can be achieved by advocacy and encouraging new blood to contribute as translators, explaining why it’s important, the light-weight technical side of translation too and of course explaining how translating applications and documentations would help in spreading FLOSS.
Needing it and I wonder who don’t need to use an app or read a documentation in his native language, although most technical people tend to prefer English regardless of their native language but what about the community? they will definitely need at least the basic documentation that is enough for them to get started.
The fun part, if you watched Human Computation you would understand what I’m talking about, people spend lots of time online for fun and we definitely can make something that is fun and useful at the same time it could be via online translation game where people compete for points, scores or karma. someone might say but translation apps and documents is different which is true but we still have a room of doing something that is fun and useful at the same time but of course this would need loads of resources.
The money part, currently we’re discussing a sponsored translation campaign to boost the process and we already got some promises to get some cash from Jordanian companies that benefits from FLOSS however this wont be enough because if we want to pay $0.05 per string then we would need around 13,000 not to mention that we also have to pay for reviewers also payment processing fees which is still feasible if we got enough cash and if we can guarantee that sponsoring a translation wouldn’t introduce licensing issue.
Finally, no single approach can solve the problem but maybe all together can make a change and thinking of it again, passion, fun and needing it are the most feasible approaches.
Tags: worst case scenario, translation status, arabic translation, native language, new blood, documentations, floss, road map, linkage, contributor, assumptions, advocacy, bugs, passion, spirit, money, ubuntu, translation
As part of Ubuntu Jordan LoCo Team continuous efforts to spread awareness about GNU/Linux in the Kingdom, the team organized a public event at The University of Jordan in Cooperation with IEEE Student Branch. Mr. Khamis SekSik gave a lecture Introducing FLOSS in the Jordanian way, as well as a brief background of FLOSS history. 
