Draft for outreach-mail

subject: Invitation to use the Translation Tool

Hi,

we, members of different teams on translation work, would like to present the Translation Tool, invite everyone to use it with us and ask you to help us improving it for the indymedia community.

What is the Translation Tool?

The Translation Tool is an Open Posting system designed for the coordination of translation work in the indymedia context.

The basic idea is to post new articles for translation using the well known "to do" / "I'll do it" / "for revision" / "done" schema for the coordination. If someone wants a text to be translated, it should be posted with the status "To Do". The translator can select this text and before s/he starts, s/he makes a comment to it, which says something like "I will do it". The moderators will see that a comment has been made and will switch the status to "I'll do it", so no one else will waste time in translating the text a second time. Finally the translation will be posted (again as a comment to the original text) and the status will change to "For revision" or "Done". That' s all.

You can visit a first draft of such a possible system at http://translations.indymedia.org. This is not the final system! In fact it could be, that we get the impression, that we need something totally different. In a combined effort we try to develop better workflows, decide about new features or maybe switch to a more flexible codebase, etc.)

For technical details on the current implementation see: http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/TranslationTool

Why a Translation Tool?

We are aware of the benefits and downsides of different information systems to coordinate translation work like mailinglists, Wiki-pages and many of us worked or still work this way. But we think there is a need for even better systems to

• prevent double-translations
• minimize the overhead of coordination
• support each other
• ...

on a global scale. We don't have a mere technical appraoch and we don't even think you should stop working the way you are working now. (E.g. translation mailinglists are still in use in our current concept.) It's just the idea of coming together and think about how to collaborate and interoperate in the best possible way.

Join us!

We think, it could be a wonderful experience to have a common space for translation work in the indymedia network, supporting each other, making use of the language capabilities of many many people around the world. But we need you to make this vision happen!

We started to find out what we need and what the next steps should be in 2 irc meetings (see summaries: http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/TranslationIrcMeeting1 + http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/TranslationIrcMeeting2) The next meeting is planned for ???

You can also meet us in the channel #TranslationTool on irc.indymedia.org

Best wishes