Language Admins

Hi guys,

Now that we have the forum running (and so far so good, I have to say I am shocked how well-received it was and how many people have already used it), I decided to go one step further with making the template international.

I came up with a concept of “Language admins”. This means that for each language there will be a person, who is sort of responsible for the translations and who I can also ask for help whenever I have a problem due to language barrier with some other user.

There are a few conditions that a “language admin” has to fulfil. Also, it is of course not guaranteed that every language will have a language admin – only if I am able to find a suitable person, who is willing to do this.

I want to emphasize that it will still be the case that anyone can translate things, however, in the past I have had situations where someone came and said, half of the translations have typos or were misunderstood. I only speak a very small percentage of all the available languages so I had to assume they are correct unless there was something very odd about it. Now the way it will work is that every time someone submits a translation, you will get a copy as well to check it. It should be relatively fast because you will not have to translate it yourself. Once this person approves it, I will add it to the language database.

Now comes the “problematic” part. I can imagine there will be languages where more people will apply. In this case I will not use the principle “first come first serve”, but I will choose one myself. This will of course depend on many things including:

• your proficiency in English
• how many and how good were the translations you have already submitted
• how long you have been using Meteotemplate (i.e. how well you know it, this is very important because the person needs to understand the topic and context)

I will always look at the combination of the above and decide who the best person to do this is. At this point I need to say – please do not feel insulted if I say no to you, this is inevitable and there is no way I can say yes to everyone. I want to make sure there really is just one person because it will make things easier and more consistent and will be for the benefit of all.

Probably the major factor I will look at is how many translations you have already submitted, also, you MUST have a profile on the Meteotemplate forum and the language you want to admin MUST be your native tongue.

For now, the tasks of a Language Admin will be:

• translate new strings (though this is not required, it only means that you can of course still submit translations yourself, or you can just let others do it)
• verify strings submitted by other users and then report to me they are ok
• check your email at least once every day or two (it is of course ok if you go on holiday for a week, but in such case please let me know. I will otherwise probably set some “deadline” and if you do not respond I will just push the translations without approval just like I did until now)
• you need to have a profile on the Meteotemplate forum and watch the sections dedicated to your language
• in case I get totally lost with some user due to language barrier, I might ask you for assistance

Now the obvious question – what do you get from this…. Well… this is obviously tough since there is not much I can offer. First you will get a good feeling from being part of Meteotemplate development and helping people. Second, I will assign you a special rank on the forum so everyone will see your status and higher ranking.

Last but not least, of course if you ever decide you no longer want to do this, you can always email me and I will totally understand and see if I can find someone else to do it.

Here is a rough plan for what to do next:

1. if you want to be a language admin, send me an email with the subject “Language admin”. In this email include the language you would like to admin, your forum nick, your experience with Meteotemplate translating, how long you have been using Meteotemplate and why you think you would be the ideal person for this. I will definitely wait a few days to get more emails from people in case several users apply for the same language, most likely a week from now I will make a decision.
2. Once I have a list of people and the languages they want to admin I will make corresponding changes at Meteotemplate.com (I will set the automatic sending of translations to you for approval)
3. I will then give you the special rank on the forum
4. Last I will post a list of language admin on the forum, Blog and the Translations page at Meteotemplate.com so that users know who to contact in case they are totally lost because of a language problem.

Of course I cannot guarantee how well this will work, how many people will apply, but it is something I thought would be worth trying.