The recent problem of the Portuguese translation of GCompris shows how important a good translation is, especially as far as free software are concerned.
I have not been able to find any news in English relating this story, and think it is essential to spread it so that people better appreciate the role translators play in the free software development process.

The Portuguese Magalhães Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0€ to 50€, depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called “Caixa Mágica” – Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general.

Caixa Mágica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation.

The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalhães netbooks.

The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation.

I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator!

I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!