Over the weekend I finally took the first step towards my resolution to take a more active role in helping out the open source community. As of last Friday, I joined the hordes of developers and open source enthusiasts who signed up for Ubuntu’s LaunchPad project and offered to help with the ongoing process of translating applications and documents from English to Portuguese (Brazil). I spoke with the organizer for this specific translation effort and was told to submit suggestions to some of the sections still pending.

Having not been officially accepted as part of the team, I guess they wanted to see if I was really willing to go through it and not just wasting their time. For approximately 17 years I lived in Brazil and my knowledge of the language and grammar is something I was very proud of. However, for the last 14-15 years I haven’t really used it much and am a bit rusty… but I guess this is like riding a bike… Once I started translating, something inside me woke up and it was smooth sailing… I did, however, have a hard time trying to translate certain tecnical words for I had never learned or used them in Portuguese before.

I’m currently working on the Translation of faqguide into Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR) and 2 other minor application translations. I have also spent several hours hanging out on #ubuntu @ Freenode on IRC and managed to help out a few users. I hope to be able to spend more time there as well as help out translating more documents to Portuguese (Brazil). One day I can tell future Brazilian Ubuntu users that I helped this great distro (and some open source applications) by making it available to them in their native language!