I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. — Douglas Adams

(Is that really a Douglas Adams quote? I recently attributed it to someone else. Oops.)

I meant to write this post much sooner, but you know how it goes when you’re tired and you have work to catch up on. Yes, tired. In a good way. Talking with other open translation people 9 to 5, and then partying with the same people 5 to … late … is tiring. But great fun!

The last thing I learned at OTT07 is that I’m from Brazil. Or possibly Portugal. At the closing party I had these little conversations:

[we all know who you are ]: Hey, where are you from? You’re from Brazil, right?
me: Nope.
wakwya: No? Are you from Portugal then?
me: No. I’m from the Netherlands.
wakwya: Really? Cause you have something really Brazilian about you!

Two minutes later: same person, same thing (word for word).

Ten minutes later:
wakwya: Where are you from?
me: I’m from Brazil!
wakwya: Really? That’s cool!
Someone else: No! He’s from the Netherlands!

Maybe someone enjoyed the beverages that everyone brought from around the world a little too much. By the way, I didn’t bring any beverage from the Netherlands. I didn’t know about the cultural beverages thing soon enough, and what nice drinks do we have here anyways?

Anyway, I suppose it’s an understandable mistake. The previous time I was in Croatia (iCommons summit Dubrovnik) I got accused of being Spanish. And a girl. But am I not a tiny little too tall to be a latina?

The semi-last thing I learned was actually related to the iSummit: conferences where everyone in principle can talk to everyone are much more useful than the old fashioned “important guy talks, everyone else listens” type. When you think about it, it’s a little weird most of the iSummit talks worked the latter way. Isn’t the commons supposed to be all about participation?

Get to the real things you learned already!

Speedgeeking taught me how to give a short and good explanation of what Passiflora is. It’s a multi-user document writing and translation program with a strong focus on document structure (outlines), separation of tasks/data, meant especially for free-licensed (eg creative commons) works. Expect a somewhat longer explanation like that to appear on the Passiflora homepage somewhat soon.

I also learned that Passiflora might be useful to provide learning data for statistical automated translation tools. It will contain (nearly) aligned translations, although possibly the amount of data could be too small to be significant.

But most important of all, I learned about something that can only be vaguely described as “processes involved in translation”, although I do think I sometimes learned what other programmers think those processes are, and not what they really are.

I was quite happy to see the “write your ideas on sticky notes and let the group order them” idea works very well. I already intended to make the document planning phase in the far future version of Passiflora work in a similar way. Nice to see it’s not a silly idea!

OTT07 was really great. It was a nice and inspiring mixture of very different people. Just geeks is also nice, between only translators I would probably feel lost, but this kind of mix is simply the most fun. Provided you can understand them, very different minds are the most interesting. When they talk about a topic all know about, then they do speak the same language (pun intended).

I think this first OTT conference may even have been a bit of some tiny little sort of historic event. Translation is all about facilitating communication, and software freedom is, in some sense, about exactly the same. Today computers are most of all communication devices. Proprietary software and secret file formats impose unfair restrictions on the recipients of communication-by computer. So software freedom makes communication easier! And then there is the shared aspect of sharing between open content and freedomware.

Open content translation people and open toolmakers have common goals but different methods and different ways of thinking. Put them together, and magic happens.