I've spent the last few days catching up on years of archive of translate-i18n. It's been an interesting read so far, the challenges we face are the same in other places, and are pretty independent of the used technology. Given the recent 50-2-100 discussion in .l10n and .planning, I found two threads from April this year particularily interesting. Morale and Draft of awareness-raising email to maintainers. The first is somewhat of a corresponding thread to 50-2-100 on their side, and the latter is a resulting inquiry for project maintainers to see if they do the right thing for localizers. As the survey is kind-of fun and adds some non-Mozilla context, I took the freedom to fill it out for you.
- Do you freeze your strings at least two weeks before release? (a) Yes (b) No (c) What strings?
- Do you send in a pre-release POT file, at least two weeks before release? (a) Yes (b) No (c) POT? Not. What rot! ... as tempting as (c) is :-)
- Do you fill in the Report-Msgid-Bugs-To address in the PO file header? (a) Yes (b) No (c) I'm in hiding.
- Do you supply contextual comments for complex strings? (a) Yes (b) No (c) I don't understand them either.
The message? No, we're not done, by far. But we're addressing the right targets, and we're improving in key areas that are of concern to localizers, inside and outside of the Mozilla project.