Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Lion Sniper (roarrr ;-)
Today we announced a sequel to our two very successful sniper programs: the Lion Sniper. The program focuses on translating Funambol software, online help and the Funambol Community Forge into many foreign languages.
Localization (or L10n, if you wondered where the name came from...) has always been a key contribution by open source communities. Due to the geographical distribution and local needs, one of the first community effort has always been localization.
A company wants to support an open source project in a country? First thing they do is translating the product in the local language. And they return it back to the community. Very simple and effective. Also for the open source project.
After having a community member translating the Funambol Forge into Chinese earlier this year, we have seen our adoption rates in China skyrocket. That translates into sales, so it is a nice positive feedback.
So much that we are pushing this forward, setting bounties for $250 for those that are willing to translate the community stuff in their language. If you are interested, check it out.
Apparently, Savio at InfoWorld agrees (thanks!).
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 17:09
2 Comments:
L10n is mandatory in most markets. If you only could make your Outlook plugin and friends to be i18n+l10n more friendly, too. Hint hint..
Q: Where is the money for a company which translates the project? Might be a good idea to elaborate on that?
Comment Posted at 01:53
Fabrizio said...
Hi KariM,
that is exactly what we are working on (the plumbing).
Regarding your second question, we do not make any distinction between a company or an individual open source contributor.
fabrizio
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