Amir {{ 🌍}} AharoniModérateur de traduction

TLV BCN

So yeah, I celebrate today, but I do hope that more people will join. Honestly, I'm fine with occasionally agreeing to terrible grammar or terminology if this means that more people participate. [end]

Actual experience tells me that projects like this usually work better when more people participate. And of course they are more sustainable, too.

Occasionally it's kind of empowering because I get to make various decisions about writing style without other people's wrong opinions getting in the way, but this feeling is fake.

Of course, this is particularly true for projects that are translated by volunteers, and in which continuous volunteer involvement is necessary.

By a flesh-and-blood human, with a job, with children, with friends, with other hobbies. Not a by an artificial "intelligence" or by a magical gnome.

One of the paradoxes of good software localization is that it should be 100% complete, but when it's complete, people forget that it's even done by someone.

The last thing is the hardest for me to imagine, but nevertheless possible.

What if I have another child, or go for a long trip in the jungle, or get ill, or die, or find something more interesting to do?

But I somehow became the main maintainer of the Hebrew translation, and it's not sustainable.

In case you haven't guessed it, that's because almost no-one but me does it. Sure, there are a few people who occasionally help add translations or correct my mistakes, and I enormously appreciate what they do.

Being a parent of a baby consumes time and energy. From 2011 or so until my first child was born in 2014, I kept Hebrew at 100% most of the time. After 2014, it took almost a year to get back at 100%.

But it's also concerning.

Wonderful because people who speak Hebrew can use Wikipedia's software fully in their language without having to know a word of English.

Wonderful because as part of making my own work more efficient I made a few changes in the configuration of our localization site, and hopefully it now makes everyone's work at least a bit more efficient.

(Meta-comment 2: This post was written in 2015, and although it's still mostly useful in 2019, it needs a few updates. Now that the translation of MediaWiki and extensions into my language is at 100%, I should publish a new version.)

(Meta-comment 1: Some people found it so useful that they translated this post into other languages.)