[FSUG-Bangalore] Fwd: [Localisation] Report on Jumpstart Localisation

[Vikram Vincent]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tushar Abraham Mathew <nrcfoss at cdac.in>
Date: 13-Apr-2007 18:38
Subject: [Localisation] Report on Jumpstart Localisation
To: localisation at iosn.net

Jumpstart Localisation goes smooth

Mid of March to the first week of April was a busy time for the IOSN
South Asia Node. The node organized its second event "Jumpstart
Localisation", a training of trainers on Localisation at CDAC,
Electronics City, Bangalore from April 6th-8th. Taking into account some
last minute bailouts, in all, there were 16 people who attended the
training. Mrs. Kendra Derousseau flew 6540 miles from Vanuatu in the
Pacific Islands to attend it. Most of the trainees arrived on the 5th
and were put up at Samrudhii Suites, very close to Electronics City. The
next morning they were taken by bus to the venue. Mr. R.K.V.S Raman,
Senior Staff Scientist, CDAC, Electronics City was to be their trainer
for the next three days. Mr. Raman has been involved with Localisation
and Language Computing for the past five years. He has also been
involved with Speech Synthesis & Recognition and his allied interests
extend to Human Computer Interaction and Semantic Web. The trainees were
handed out kits along with the IOSN Localisation Primer
(http://www.iosn.net/l10n/foss-localization-primer/). The trainer
started with the terminologies and resources required for anyone wanting
to take up Localisation (l10n). He then cited the evolution of some
Indian languages, history of different encoding schemes, the Unicode
Standard and well known Localisation efforts. Another important aspect
that was touched upon was Cultural Localisation. Mr. Raman mentioned an
example in Tamil where in a word, the same letter could have different
pronunciations hence conveying a totally different meaning. Kendra who
spoke French gave a similar example and on both occasions, the laughter
was uncontrollable. Her knowledge of French came as a boon as we took up
its peculiarities like accents which wouldn't have been covered
otherwise.

On the second day, we moved on to Fonts, types and differences. The Sri
Lankan, Mr. Anura, had lots of questions during this session as he came
from a paper industry background. The session that followed was on
various Text Flows, Input Methods, Keyboard Layouts, Rendering Engines,
tools used in Translation, importing translations from other
applications and migrating translated applications to newer versions of
software. During all this time, Mr. Safal from Nepal was the quite one.

What saw keen interest from the trainees was probably the third day
session on Internationalizing applications and approaches followed. The
various functions used for internationalization (i18n) in Java and C
were also covered. The final session took us through CLDR charts and
overview of Font Designing. Bangladeshi Mr. Khandakar Mujihidul Islam
took particular interest in that one. He also spent a considerable
amount of his time testing the limits of his camera's memory.

Inputs provided from members of Swatantra Malayalam Computing and Debian
Kannada Localisation who were present were also helpful. Malayalam and
Kannada are languages spoken in the Indian states of Kerala and
Karnataka respectively.

After the training, the trainees were taken on a one day sightseeing
trip to Mysore. In store were palaces and temples and even a zoo. A
tired group bid their goodbyes the next day.

In order to ensure that the group stays in touch and continue
localisation efforts as well as solve each other's problems, a mailing
list localisation at iosn.net was created. It was deliberately given a
generic name so as to include more people from the Asia Pacific hence
bringing with them wider expertise and a broader spectrum of languages.
The list can be accessed at
http://lists.iosn.net/mailman/listinfo/localisation.

_______________________________________________
Localisation mailing list
Localisation at iosn.net
http://lists.iosn.net/mailman/listinfo/localisation


-- 
Regards
Vikram Vincent
+919448810822
http://groups.google.com/group/bangalore_alive/
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Campaign_to_promote_free_software_in_karnataka
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