Project Details & Presentation
In this presentation, I aim for 6 main things:
- To be as clear as possible to ease the work of the moderator.
- To provide proper information about the current project.
- To propose the logs of my personal work and interactions with this project.
- To educate the readers about
and the open-source culture.
- To show a model of transparency and accountability toward our community.
- To reach a bigger/larger audience of devoted Netizens.
Project Dissection:
PrestaShop is what we call in the world of the open-source development, a freemium solution. A gamer myself, I believe that most gamers out there know very well the meaning of freemium games/software. (1) But this is not the case here, because we are dealing with something totally different. I personally did not know that we can pair the concept of a freemium solution/product, with an open source e-commerce. First, to make things clear, let’s start first with the official definition of this platform directly from the company itself, and the information is as the following: (2)
“PrestaShop is an efficient and innovative e-commerce solution with all the features you need to create an online store and grow your business.”
And according to the website, this platform aims for one important thing which is “Our mission is to develop world-class eCommerce software through open source innovation. Together with our community, we provide software that enables everyone to have a successful eCommerce business”. (3)
Image by V.F - The website offers a very responsive demo version for anyone who wants to play with.
And this is exactly where things get interesting, PrestaShop does not have something really revolutionary compared to the other FOSS that I worked on. But by digging deeper, I discovered that this project has something that not all the projects I've worked on have. A big and dedicated, diversified and loyal community. The project on Crowdin has over 190k words; but still, people are competing me in finishing the translation of my own language, which I personally find very great and very encouraging.
Projects are always easier to tackle when there is a huge community around it. I am pretty sure that at the time of writing these words, strings are being pushed for my language. The sense of collectivism is really strong around this project, and I really wish all projects hade the same dedication from the PO. With approximatively 200-250k shops around the world, and used in more than 163 countries, with more than 60 languages available. (4)
This platform is really a big player in the field of the eCommerce industry. PrestaShop has also more than 300 built-in features for managing the product lists, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers. In addition to this, it uses a web template system that allows users to customize their stores and add new features by adding the add-ons. (5)
One other interesting thing I stated above is that the platform proposes and I quote “A Powerful Freemium Open Source Solution with International Reach”. The company is really trying all the possible capabilities and services to enhance the experience of the users/customers, and at the same time, the profitability of the stores. To find our way in this maze, I will directly quote the point of view that the company stated about this model: (6)
"With its completely free solution that is available for download, PrestaShop offers endless opportunities to help merchants succeed! The company has teamed up with more than 80 industry-leading partners, such as PayPal and OVH, and offers 3,500 modules for payments, logistics, sales promotions, and more, all aimed at improving a store's features."
The Why:
The question of why will always be a question of the omnipotent nature of the virtue, genuineness, conviction, ethics, and value. Thus, I will allow myself to share the same convictions I hold most dear. Fare from the scourge, of the oblivion world!
launched a call for all the moderators to write a contribution to speak about their thoughts in relation with and the open-source community/culture. I started to write an article for my community, and one of the few questions that I tried to answer this question “How can we; as humans, conceive doing something just for the greater good?”. A hard question to answer.
Is doing something for free a key factor in defining a true dedication for a community or an idea? or it is more like a question of values and the amount of intellect and time invested to do good? I can argue that the architecture of the world of today can lead us to see idealism as some kind of illusion, a country for the weakest, for people who can’t face reality; yet, I have always wondered why it was so difficult to apply an idealistic model of working, it must be us! which lead me to my next point.
In my time working as a language manager, I came to a few conclusions that I already pointed out in my article. One of those conclusions is that the open-source culture is not really for everyone. Thanks to the few events that happened lately, we had an idea and a distilled conclusion at the same time. The neural system of
Theoretically, I am quite sure that any initiative based in an open-source environment, will always have the same issues that we are having here in
Well, why I’m here? I’m playing the role of the dragon's teeth (Drachenzähne) against those waves of realism! … This is just a granular contribution compared to the whole matrix of the open-source world.
the English language, to the Arabic language.
Proof of Work
The current contribution can be seen as a continuous equilibrium of the new issues that I faced before and the new information that I gathered from the project owner. As always, the language moderator was the catalyzer this time again to do a more in-depth research about the way that I(we) should proceed. I did some advanced research in a sense where I tried to filter the terms used in the previous strings, to choose the appropriate one.
Same as the previous contribution, the translation difficulty felt a bit difficult this time, but clearly not hard, the main issue remains the massive number of wrong entries, and sometimes, it is a bit struggling to go through a project with over 100k words to find the proper words/terms/concepts, or just to respect the coherence of the whole project.
This project also showed and proved to me the idea of how dangerous it can be when a project has the wrong proofreaders or many proofreaders at the same time. I think this is one of the drawbacks on Crowdin. We need to understand that translating a whole project can be very and extremely pricey, but let’s just face the reality, opting for a free approach will always have its downsides and pitfalls compared to using professional translators and proofreaders.
Below, as always, I will try to provide an update about all the information that might be relevant for a reason or another.
Proof of Brain
After a very good input from the language moderator, I reached to the project owner again because of the issue that I mentioned in my last contribution. A critical case that leads to the abstention from approving many strings, would it not be easier to just approve the strings and move on? The answer is yes, but I think we have an ethical duty to do the right thing here. Let me just be clear here, doing the proper research is not something fun to do, nor enjoyable in most cases, there is a price for genuineness, and that price can be very high. So, even though I am sure that doing all of this is very time consuming, boring, and very tedious, I never doubted, not even a single second, that this is what should be done and the right thing to do. This will allow me to present a high-quality contribution to the readers, everyone should in my opinion craft his contribution meticulously and carefully because his work at the end will reflect his persona, his team, and the community he belongs to.
I know that this is nothing, but I want again to thank the managers of this project, they speak with us more like if we were close friends, very helpful, and open to discussions. I personally wish that all the projects have the same level of care and cooperation. It’s very frustrating when you are waiting for 30 days or even more just to get an answer from the project owner/ managers. LIFE! Yes I understand that life is almost is always unfair, managers are people too, and most of the projects we are working on are open source projects. I can understand that those projects will not be the most active one when we speak of the quality of support. The latter is the main reason why I wanted to leave a word about the managers of the current project I am working on. By giving importance to the work that we are doing, they created a safe/professional environment for the translators to work in, people will feel that they are taking part in something. The is why I will do my best to perfect all my contributions to this project. There is no reason to fail!
I was clearly advised by the managers to do my best to perfect the translation despite the previous strings approved, they have also asked me if I can correct the older string, which is the thing that I will try to do after finishing and completing the translation of this project. But I must say that I will mainly do because they showed us a very good attitude, we are also working to help open source projects to thrive. It is our common goal at the end to help each other for the sake of the open source culture.
In my last contribution, the percentage of the project completion was at 90%. But on 8 October 2018, I received an email, more strings are in! (8,067 new strings for translation [48,127 words]), and more strings were added a few days later, which caused the percentage to drop again to 89%.
On my second contribution, I stated that I changed the project from OroCRM to the current one because of a simple issue, the LM did not have the proper role to proofread my contribution efficiently, but the situation changed lately. Thus, I will try to see with the LM if I should keep working on this project, or to switch to the older one.
I had to suddenly change the project for the simple reason that the project owner/managers are quite inactive in regard to accepting new translators/proofreaders. But, I will for sure go back to work on the previous projects when the situational requirements are met, and by the same occasion, to mitigate any personal preferences.(5)
- I believe that a difference between a low-quality contribution and a good quality contribution is equal to the time a translator is willing to invest genuinely on a project/contribution.
- The thumbnail image contains the logo of the project, the logo of utopian, and a DaVinci logo is available to use under CC0 on seeklogo.com. the whole/final design was done by me.
- I understand more now why the job of a proofreader exists, it's truly amazing how you can read a string 3 or more time to check for a simple mistake but you don't find a thing. Yet another eye will easily find an error. We are all prone to error. This experience also showed me how much the brain can be weakened, to the point where even the obvious will become hidden.
- I am planning to revamp the presentation in the future contributions to make it cleaner and with a minimalist style.
- Premium:
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium
(2) https://www.prestashop.com/en
(3) https://www.prestashop.com/en/about-us
(4) press-releases/2014/10/01/internationalization-and-open-source-drive-growth-for-prestashop
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrestaShop#cite_note-1
(6) https://danlargo.com/2012/03/29/the-freemium-business-model/
(7) https://crowdin.com/profile/LouiseBonnard
(8) https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@dr-frankenstein/translation-arabic-prestashop-part1-1122w-or-c2
[F.W.count: Final Word Count] | [T.W.C.T: Total Word Count Translated]
| W.C | Untranslatables | F.W.C | T.W.C.T | P.% | C.T | Cont.Num |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
~1312 | ~240 | ~1072 | 6916 | 89 | 10-15/10-24 | 4 |