I've been Near Everest

This is a report of my activities while attending GNOME Asia 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal. I have given several FOSS conference presentations, but this is my first time I went abroad to deliver it.

I feel at home in Kathmandu, Nepal. Many things are similar between Indonesia and Nepal. Right in front of my hotel, cable installation are spaghetti-like, not far from what we have in Indonesia.

Another important thing is their traffic uses the normal left line, unlike of those some weird countries (that we shouldn't name :D). No suprise here. I can easily do crossing. There are many zebra crosses, but those traffic are never slowing down waiting for you. You have to have an initiative instead. Exactly same situation in Indonesia.

Kathmandu seems to has no high building. My hotel was only 7 floors. Many other buildings around are lower. My hotel have a perfect view for sunrise:

I only have to walk around 300 meters to conference venue. Big factor for me since my stamina was deteriorated significantly after I got COVID-10 Omicron variant.

Initially I was scheduled to give my presentation on the 2nd day, but then swapped into the 1st day:

Presentation slide is in Slideshare.

Several other interesting sessions in this GNOME Asia 2023 are Introduction to writing accessible applications with GTK4 and Fedora 39 Release Party. In his talk about GNOME Accessibility, Federico gave me some ideas (need to be developed further) about possibility to do shortcut conflict checking automatically. Usually when developers make their software, they are aware that some shortcuts in the same menu or dialog might conflict. But when those menus and dialogs are being translated, us translators usually don't have sufficient context to see if our translation have generated conflicted shortcuts. Doing build check and running those applications to manually inspect those shortcut conflicts are not easy to do, especially to have 100% coverage of all menus and dialogs. We also need to consider that some menu or dialog entries might be disabled on some situations, making inspection harder.

After conference, I really want to see Everest my own eye. There are at least 3 alternatives: helicopter tour to Everest base camp (too expensive), 1 hour Everest mountain flight (still too expensive, beware of different pricing for Indian and Pakistani passport holders to foreign ones, usually foreign passport holder got 2x higher), and Nagarkot sunrise. I choose Nagarkot, which was much cheaper. 1 hour car Kathmandu - Nagarkot, then short hike to top of observation hill. You must be brave enough to climb around 5 meter of tower at top of the hill to get unobstructed 360 degrees view.

I was not lucky enough to get clear sunrise. Nor I get a good view of Himalayan mountain. So near but not so lucky to get good weather.

Thanks to GNOME Foundation for providing me travel support to attend this conference.

LOUCA23 - An Interesting, Combined LibreOffice and Ubuntu Conference

Another year, another cool conference! This time is LOUCA 2023, a combined conference for LibreOffice and Ubuntu. It was on Saturday and Sunday, October 7^th & 8^th, 2023 in Universitas Sebelas Maret, Surakarta. I presented a lightning talk on first day, titled "State of Ubuntu Indonesian Translation". My first time giving a lightning talk (only 10 minutes! usually I have longer session, but for this occassion, I tried if I can effectively use a shorter one), and EO has put someone with very helpful banners within audiences, saying "5 minutes left", "1 minute left", "time's up" (or so, didn't really remember what was written :D). Thank you! It helped me manage my timing.

For you who can not attend, or attended but did not clearly catch what I said there, I will explain again here:

1. for Ubuntu Jammy (22.04), if you check Ubuntu's translation platform, you will see numbers like this (beware, language listed here will depend on your site settings; since I am a member of Indonesian and Javanese teams, by default Ubuntu Launchpad display those two languages):

As you can see, there are 180k+ strings still not translated into Indonesian, from total around 317k strings. More than half!

2. For Ubuntu Mantic (23.10), it is even worse, around 208k+ untranslated, from total around 350k strings.

 

Why so low? Do they really represent the real condition when someone tried to use Indonesian while using Ubuntu?

The answer has several parts. First, Ubuntu has created a list of packages that can be translated via its translation platform. Not all packages installable from Ubuntu repo can be translated via Launchpad. If you check using aptitude, you will see around

• 80k installable packages
• 25k virtual packages
• 30k tasks

3. For Ubuntu Mantic, that list only contain 558 packages.

Many of those packages are considered low priority to be translated. Who need Indonesian translation of gcc, gdb, and gas for instance? Of course they are there. But how many? Most Indonesian translators have elected to help translation of other packages instead.

The second part is, that several big packages has their own translation flow & infrastructure. Ubuntu only get final result (code + translation) and did not provide further translation. One (maybe more?) exception is GNOME. GNOME has Damned Lies for translation, but then Ubuntu take code and translation from upstream, and then add some Ubuntu specific modification upon them, and use Launchpad to facilitate Ubuntu specific translations.

4. Translation flow of several projects

5. Some projects which use Ubuntu Launchpad for their translations:

So see it yourself, how complete Ubuntu Indonesian translation is. If you use GNOME, I think it will be almost 100% done.

Last but not least, if you want to help us keeping Ubuntu Indonesian translation better and better for next releases, join us via Ubuntu Launchpad. Start with giving suggestion to untranslated strings, those will be considered in your application acceptance into Indonesian translation team.

Try to contact these team admin if you feel your application was not processed soon enough.

Happy translating!

PS: Thank you for Organizers and Sponsors! Very good planning and execution. Delicious meals! Interesting city tour the day after.