Hello, everyone. So we have here Benjamin Jamie who will be sharing should there be
a standard and Libra localization. Ideas on how to make it easy for translators to contribute
to any FOSS project they like. Thank you, Benjamin.
Thank you for the applause. I didn't deserve that yet, definitely. Thank you for being
in such a large count here. So I'm Benjamin. I work in WebLate. I do the talking there
and you can also meet Michael in this lovely hoodie here and he's the mind behind the code
and everything and the founder. I won't be talking much about WebLate here. That's the
talk tomorrow in translation's dev room. Here I would like to share a story and kick
off something probably that could become a standard in Libra localization because at
the moment it's nothing like that there. At first I would like to talk a short start
of WebLate story. It doesn't start like a masterminded start-up plan that will get a
lot of money and conquer the world of the localization. No, that's other companies.
We are Libra software from the start and Michael actually started it when he was working at
SUSE and now SUSE people are very proud that they started it during the SUSE hack week 12
years ago. Sorry, 11 years ago. And for a long time this is the office. It was actually
the office at the top of the building of those large concrete buildings you have around the
Czech Republic built in socialism and when you needed an elevator there, there was those
like small on top of the building blocks where you put all the machinery for your elevator
but it's not needed now so all the machinery is downstairs in the shaft and Michael had
his office on the top of the building and it's like three to four meters or something
like that and that's how he started it and it was not aimed to do something that will
be masterminded and well prepared for all the use cases. It was just in the start the
use case that Michael wanted something better than PUTL which was a very popular tool but
no longer maintained and something that's very tightly integrated with this version
control system so you don't have to do much of the manual work and you are a developer
so you connect Weblight to your version control system and it just works. You don't have to
care about anything and then everything is in the editor and you know localization editors
from Weblight and from other similar tools and then more and more big open source projects
and some commercial companies went to ask Michael, hey, we would like to use it. Can
we pay you for supporting it and yeah that's how Weblight started getting bigger and these
days there are large or small Libre projects that are using Weblight and oh sorry I forgot
to put a pen pod logo there. We'll do tomorrow but there is Calidas and more and more Libre
projects started using it and it became some sort of a go for tool and then Fedora came
I think three years back to us and migrated all their stuff from Xanata from their original
platform they created to Weblight because Xanata was like we don't have time for that,
that's not our core of business so we won't use Weblight and that's how we realized that
this is maybe the thing that will be happening more and it became our responsibility. We
took very seriously to give the tool to the communities that they can use happily and
they can contribute to but it's still just one platform. It's Weblight and we created
last year a page called Discover Weblight so if you are on a hosted Weblight, if you
have your projects on a hosted Weblight which is the largest instance of Weblight on the
internet it's easy to search there and it will be even easier throughout this year because
of the development and if you host yourself your instance we wanted to give the users
a place where they can come and search through all the Weblight instances that are open to
contribute to this page so at this point if the project is using Weblight you have this
place and you can search for your project name let's say Benpot and you will be guided
to the right place and you can contribute to the localizations there but what about
if the project because there are so many projects in Libra world that are not using Weblight
yet or they want to stick with different tool because it's always your choice what do you
use in your community. Sorry. So there became an idea and I think two years back and that's
really important to say the time frame I was speaking with Dwayne. Dwayne is a wonderful
person author of Translate Toolkit which is one of the core component for that Weblight
uses to work with translation files and Dwayne is very talkative like I am so we were talking
a lot and then I told him yeah and maybe there should be a way for someone that wants to
contribute to Libra software like one place possibly federated because so it's not in
one central place where I as a translator of Libra software that's not technically
savvy and I want to contribute the time to the project of my choice but I don't want
to search through readme's and wiki's because every project has its own different way or
there is no information and you have to really dig hard to find it or if you are at Fosdem
you can walk around the booths and see a little bit like a little advertisement or small stand
that says this project is localized on Weblight but if you are in the online world you are
you will spend usually a lot of time to find where is the right place to localize your
favorite software and I told that to Dwayne and Dwayne said oh yeah I had that idea a
while before and I have it very roughly specified and we were talking more and then he sent
like nine pages long nice specification of how it could look like and how it could work
and there are so many other features that we would like to have there but that was two
years ago and nothing happened because there is no time to do that in Weblight team and
it should be a community thing it shouldn't be something that Weblight says this is the
thing how you should do it and everybody should use it it can be like that but we are at Fosdem
there are so many wonderfully skilled people that may be interested in not only helping
with the actual development but also sharing their ideas and maybe they because it's such
obvious thing that's missing maybe there are so many people that already have similar ideas
or some kind of specification and I would like to use this talk if you have an idea
I just want to kick it off we are not working on it yet we just want to connect we want
to discuss and maybe in a year on next Fosdem we will have something like that and a lot
of projects could use that or every project on Fosdem and it shouldn't be just about
Weblight it should be maybe a file like you have a license file in your repository or
a readme file that can be indexed by some tool so if I want to have an instance a server
where I could guide let's say I'm a localization lab or some other lovely group of people that
wants to localize open source software they can use some kind of tool put it on their
website on their own server and tell if you have your time select language you want to
contribute to and find your project and this might should index those readme's or translation
md files from not only github and gitlab but probably more and more can it be done probably
yes it has it will have some limits it probably won't scan all the repositories in the world
that's not possible but maybe we can make something bigger than discover Weblight that's
universal use for everyone now what should they do is to guide the translator to the
right platform to the right place because if I'm a translator I don't and I don't know
all the technical way of the localization which can be make easier by localization management
software like Weblight I just want to translate my hello to hello and that's it and it should
be unified so everybody can use it it should be possible to index it somehow to search
through it and yeah that's that's a start and probably there is much more that it should
do it but in a started this would be nice and yeah let's discuss if you go not right
now because I have to add a link once I finish the talk but this is the place where you can
go and search through Weblight schedule I just double check yeah it's right there is
no miss click so if you go there you can see all the schedule all the plans we as Weblight
have for this for them I will add there a link to the discussion and you can join you
can share it with your friends that are interested in such things and maybe we will come up with
something interesting for every possible translator in the Libre community or in ideal way this
tool or this localization file or translation and whatever we will call it can do can welcome
you translators that don't feel I'm a translator and then don't know how to get there maybe
to make it easy for everyone so that's it that's what I wanted to share with you and
yeah I'm interested in what do you think maybe we still have three minutes so we can talk
something right now you can also if you go to that link you can also find our bio stickers
t-shirts and yeah other things and you can share your ideas there about Weblight and
what we should include and if you don't like something just come there and tell us or you
can join the online discussion that will be ready in a few minutes and yeah thank you
for your attention and if anybody has a question or anything just raise your hand or come here
and tell it to us thank you for your time and injera for them