Hi folks,
I followed up with both the Marketing Director and the Engineering
VP for our Eclipse-based product lines. They confirmed what I said on the
phone…no ability to staff the translation project because we do not do
translations internally.
Doug G
From:
eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bjorn
Freeman-Benson
Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 2:29 PM
To: eclipse.org-planning-council
Subject: [eclipse.org-planning-council] Minutes from Friday's call
abouttranslations
Planning Council,
Here are the results of our call on Friday regarding translating Europa and a
translations project in general. Attending were: Rich Gronback, Jess Garms,
Wenfeng Li, Patt Huff, David Williams, John Graham, Masoyuki Jwanaga, Doug
Schaefer, Doug Gaff, Mike Milinkovich and at least one other person whose name
I did not catch.
The advance goal of this call was that, having received the size estimates of the
translation effort for the various projects over the previous week, we were
going to report back on our conversations with our collective employers about
whether they were willing to put resources into translating Europa and/or a
translation project that will help the community translate Europa and future
simultaneous releases.
This goal was only met in the negative: Doug and Doug stated that Wind River
and QNX were not planning to provide resources to translate/a translations
project. Doug Gaff said that he would ask around, but did not expect a positive
reply. Everyone else (with three exceptions below) remained silent -
unfortunately, silence implies the negative and thus everyone (with three
exceptions below) has stated that their companies are not going to provide
resources.
The three exceptions are: BEA, Actuate, and IBM. These three are having a
conference call next week and will report back to this list. It remains
uncertain at this time whether these three companies will volunteer the
resources necessary to do either the translations or the translations project,
but at least they are continuing the conversation. It was _very_ clear that
none of these three was willing to do the work on their own - the question only
remains whether they are willing to share the work without further help from
other Eclipse members.
John Graham also suggested that someone might find a third-party company to do
the work, get a bid, and then the EMO could ask around if the member companies
are willing to co-fund the contract. We had no volunteers to do that initial
"find a third-party company" step.
Mike explained that we should be very, very clear about the situation:
- Non-English-speaking countries are the fastest
areas of growth in Eclipse downloads.
- Non-English-speaking countries already account
for more than 35% of the downloads.
- There will NOT BE any translations of Europa
projects if we do not have a translations effort/project.
- Someone needs to step up and lead this project or
it's not going to happen. Period.
Notes taken and posted by Bjorn