Interview with Marco De Vitis of ATO.

-- Translations FOR FRRRREEEE -- !!!

Today I feel... "ATOmic"!

Torna alla Home Page di AMiWoRLD Forgetting this start of the meanest quality, a real nightmare for the hopes of seriousness of our poor De Vitis, let's dive in a confrontation, hoping it will colour in the proper light the goodness of such an initiative.

PettynATO:
Hi baby, (BTW: does such a start hurt you?).
 
De Vitis^ATO
No, it doesn't hurt me, but to be sincere it seems a little excessive to me, seems like I'm being approached by a queer figure in a disco :). Isn't a friendly "Hi Marco" enough for you?
 
PettynATO:
No, it lacks personality, and what's more... I'm a disco-addict!!! ;) Apart from lacks of personality, introduce yourself to AmiWorld's readers, please.
 
De Vitis^ATO
My name is Marco De Vitis, I'm 26 years old, I was born and I live in Rome, Italy, where I'm a student in electronics engineering. Hobbies: Amiga and music (I'm a keyboard player); often the hobbies overcome the "official" occupation :-). Special peculiarities: terribly careful of other people's mistakes :-). As your readers already should know, I'm here in the role of (current) administrator of the Italian division of the Amiga Translators' Organization. I joined it in April 1997, and I became administrator of ATO-Italy at the end of January 1998.
 
PettynATO:
Uhm, a fast career! Let's test your language skills: sum up in a few lines the history, the aim and the usefulness of ATO. :)
 
De Vitis^ATO
I could easily manage this telling you to visit our web site on http://ato.vapor.com/ato or by sending you the ATO FAQ ;-) (Don't believe you can get out of it with so little! ndPetty). Anyway, I'll try to be concise. (Here, now that's fine! ndPetty).

The aim of ATO is to provide an useful service to both Amiga users in general and programmers, allowing users to use applications nicely translated in their own language, and offering programmers an organized and cheap localization service. The advantages of this are evident: the users, besides being able to work with a system which "speaks" their own language, can enjoy a better consistency of terms and conventions. Programmers, as a consequence, can expect their applications to spread more around thanks to the localization in many languages, moreover they have a reference point for when they are in need and they have some warranty on the final product quality which they would probably not have by trusting occasional translators.

For what regards the history and beginnings of ATO I can only refer to what I read in the ATO FAQ, as I only joined afterwards. It seems it all started from a mail written on May, 12th 1996 in the MUI mailing list, by a person who offered to translate a new MUI class into Norwegian. This fired the typical sparkle in someone's mind, talks did start, and ATO was born. The organization has then obviously grown up, and new divisions have been added one by one: we currently have 24 of them, and the 25th is going to be created. I hope I'm not wrong (I've only got a vague memory about this), but I think the Italian division has been one of the first to be created, administered at the time by Paolo Menichetti; then it was the turn of Vincenzo Gervasi, also known as contributor for the famous (and now, unfortunately, closed) Italian magazine "Amiga Magazine", and then there is me, at least until January, 31st 1999, the date when my mandate will end.

 
PettynATO:
Best wishes for the re-election! Let's suppose I'm a programmer who would like to take advantage of your services, what do I have to do? What are my obligations towards you, and yours towards me?
 
De Vitis^ATO
The payment ATO asks for is very humble, commercially speaking: a registered copy of the program we're going to translate, for each member involved in the translation process; this usually means two copies for each language, plus another one more for the project coordinator. As most of the programs we translate are freeware, we often work for free. Moreover, we ask the author to insert the names of the translators in the program's documentation and, if possible, inside the program itself; this is usually accomplished by simply inserting in the guide, or even putting it in the distribution archive as a separate file, a standard "ATO.readme" text which contains some brief informations on ATO. Our rules also consider the possibility of some other form of payment, such as money, depending on the situation (for example: big commercial projects), but we didn't happen to find ourselves in such situations, yet. Last but not least, of course, there are some moral obligations: the translators need to know exactly what the requested work is, and they have to be sure that their work will not be wasted, so honesty and respect are needed on both sides. A note about the number of members assigned to a project: as I mentioned before, this number is usually fixed to two members for each language, and it can be increased for particularly compelling translations, if the program author or publisher agrees, of course. The two members have the roles of translator and proofreader; we encountered some problems with authors who thought the proofreader was useless, and I can understand that people who never translated an application can have problems understanding his usefulness, but I would like to take this opportunity to understress how much proofreading is instead an ESSENTIAL stage to obtain a high quality result: the additional check made by eyes different from the translator's ones never misses to reveal faults or chances of improvement, however skilled the translator could be.

About translators, their main obligation towards the author is to deliver the requested result within the fixed deadline and guarantee a good quality for it. Our members engage themselves to satisfy the author's requests, to leave any section of the text unchanged unless differently agreed with the author, to not spread non-public files and to translate future updates of the same program, unless they really are unable to do it. Moreover, the translated files remain property of the program's author.

 
PettynATO:
Could you explain us how things proceed from the translation proposal on to the final result?
 
De Vitis^ATO
A person is choosen within ATO (he usually is the one who established the first contact with the author) to take the role of "project coordinator". From now on, the coordinator will be the only contact between ATO and the author, as much as possible; this has the aim of making life easier for the author, so that he hasn't got to handle contacts directly with all single translators. The coordinator will act as a bridge between all involved members and the author for everything, ranging from an info request to the final delivery. Summarizing the translation process, the author sends the material to the coordinator, who distributes it to all members assigned to the project; they carry on with their job and, when they've completed it, they deliver the translation to the author, through the project coordinator again.
 
PettynATO:
What does actuelly mean being administrator of the Italian division of ATO? What are the responsibilities, and what the satisfactions?
 
De Vitis^ATO
You wrote "actuelly" (see "special peculiarities", in the first answer ;-)). (I wanted to check if you were paying attention! ndPetty). Local administrators have to coordinate their own divisions and the relevant members. This means, in practice, controlling that everything flows correctly, that deadlines are honoured, that translations keep a certain quality standard,and so on. There are of course many responsibilities, particularly on important projects or strict deadlines; should anything go wrong, it wouldn't be the translator alone cutting a poor figure, neither the single ATO-Italy division: the impression which final users (in case of a badly done translation) or the program's author (in case we are not honouring the terms of the agreement) would get out of it would involve the whole ATO, running the risk of damaging its reputation. This all could happen just for the fault of one single person who didn't take his task too seriously. But I have to say that the satisfactions abundantly compensate for this: seeing a group of people who in most cases even don't know each other personally, of different ages, from all corners of Italy, collaborating in a friendly and enthusiastic way with the aim of helping other people (the authors) physically even more distant from them, all practically for free, surely is an incredible experience (Just like AmiWorld, actually! ndPetty). Moreover, for what regards the Italian division in respect to ATO in general, the fact that it is one of the more active and well organized makes me even more proud.
 
PettynATO:
In your opinion, what makes the Italian division one of the more active ones? What are the reasons for its success?
 
De Vitis^ATO
The situation in ATO reflects the general Amiga situation, and the Italian Amiga community is very active at the moment. However, most of the credits go to the previous administrators, who succeeded in keeping the attention of our members alive and organized our division; Vincenzo Gervasi, for example, takes care of our web site and mailing list in an excellent way. I'm trying to continue the tradition by using their same tricks, and I think I'm being a nuisance enough to avoid my subordinates getting asleep for too long ;-). Of course, if the division actually works fine this is due to the co-operation of all members.
 
PettynATO:
"subordinates", "trks"... You sound like a dictator!! ;)
 
De Vitis^ATO
I'd like to be one, but a smiley always pops out :-). And, anyway, I didn't write "trks" ;-)).
 
PettynATO:
Anyway, it's really admirable that, in a small reality such as the Amiga one, a maniple of fearless people succeeded in offering a free translation service. Just like any kind of voluntary service, ATO has its limits: what about them?
 
De Vitis^ATO
You played a sad note. This surely is the weak spot in ATO, for various reasons.

As I mentioned above, it can happen that someone doesn't take his task too seriously. This is due to the knowledge of the fact that we're providing almost for free a service that usually has a price in "the real world", and starting from this idea it becomes somehow easy passing on to something like "I'm doing a favour to the program's author", so taking the job not too seriously. Actually, we always have to remember that at the other side we have a person who is trusting us for the success of his program, which could have requested him months or even years of work, and that its spreading in our own countries depends much on how we'll do our job. We all know how unpleasant it feels using a badly translated application.

Moreover, being a voluntary service, we do it in the free time we can find in our everyday life. This means that, if the person in charge for a translation has some unexpected problems which prevent him from working on the project, the translation will be affected by this, at least for what regards the date of delivery. Unfortunately, no one is to blame for this: if a translator has some important things that keep him away from his computer, like for example his work or family problems, we can't expect him to disregard them just to work on the translation of the next shareware program for Amiga, being concrete. Personally, I often subtracted time to more important - but not in a way that they couldn't be put off - things to find time for ATO, and I know that many others did the same.

 
PettynATO:
Ever thought about the trick Scott uses on the Enterprise? Just exaggerate the times of delivery you announce and then deliver your work with large anticipation, so making yourselves look like wizards! ;)
 
De Vitis^ATO
The problem is that we're almost never the ones who fix the deadlines: when a program is ready for the localization phase, the author generally already has a date in mind for its release, and we have to adapt ourselves to it. The requests we receive are sometimes nearly impossible to fulfil for translators who work in their free time :-/.

Going back to the subject of important engagements which can hinder the translation process, sometimes you have no choice. You only have to try being concrete and understand your limits, avoiding making promises which we could not be able to fulfil, prey to our own enthusiasm.

Finally, this also is the reason why some software houses sometimes feel suspicious about us; they don't think ATO is able to provide a professional translation service, given its "amateurish" nature, but they don't know that most of our members are actually able to show an impressing curriculum. And you must not forget our main advantage over any professional translation team: we are Amiga users, we feel at ease with our system, we surely know the meaning of all technical terms and references to the operating system which we can encounter. Get a professional translator and ask him whether he knows what "tooltypes" are... but be prepared to pay an expensive bill for the answer ;-).

 
PettynATO:
Which paths does ATO intend to follow to further improve itself?
 
De Vitis^ATO
Our main aim at the moment surely is working hard to gain more faith on behalf of developers. I have to admit that, in my opinion, there are some faults in our international network: some divisions, sometimes even relative to important languages, don't seem to be active enough, or maybe they simply miss the necessary people to take part to most proposed projects. They sometimes are division relative to minor languages, and given the low number of Amiga users, I can understand finding new efficient members in the relevant countries can be hard; but in other situations I wonder at the lack of participation, and I think we should make up for this as soon as possible, trying to renew the structure of some divisions.

By the way, the search for new members offers another hot matter: how can we be sure about the quality of translations into languages which we don't know? Every local administrator could do some sort of "entrance examination" for new members but, besides the fact that this wouldn't fit much nicely an organization based on volunteers who generously give their time to other people for free, still there would be the problem of the administrator himself: no other ATO member could be able to evaluate his mastery of his same native language. And how could a project coordinator guarantee to the author of the relevant program that the translation into a language they both ignore will be done as it should? The relationships between local administrators are based on mutual faith, but the only thing which can really give us confidence or make us understand if we're doing something wrong is the feedback from final users.

So, friends, make us hear your voices! When you read in the documentation for a program that it has been translated into your language thanks to ATO, make us know your opinion, so that we can take note of it and try to offer an ever improving service, for both you and the programmers. This is important, please!

 
PettynATO:
Our readers can train themselves by looking at the translations for AmiWorld's articles... ;) How much of the soul of the Amiga community is in ATO? And, should there be one day no more material to translate (touch wood as appropriate), what would happen to ATO??
 
De Vitis^ATO
ATO was born from the soul of the Amiga community: it exactly represents the desire, which practically all Amiga users have, to do something for our platform just for the simple pleasure of doing it. We won't miss material to translate as long as applications will continue to come out, and I have no reason at the moment to doubt that Amiga, one way or another, will still live for a long time. Should we miss any material to translate one day, this would mean that there would be no more Amiga users; Amiga would be dead in this case, and ATO with it, too. But Amiga users, each time they leave our platform, tend to keep along with them the things they learned during these years, and their experience would surely not be wasted, being probably addressed in other forms of co-operation.
 
PettynATO:
I agree with you. Do you believe it would be possible to reuse in alternative systems the ideal property which is behind Amiga, meant as the "modus vivendi" of our community (especially in the beginnings), that very special habit of mind only partially shared with the Linux friends?
 
De Vitis^ATO
As I just mentioned, I think that outside of our "world" Amiga users are trying to somehow reproduce the comfortable environment which they were accustomed to work in, and this is a good thing; unfortunately, this is not always possible, due to the intrinsic limits of other systems. It is sometimes too difficult to bring elements of the Amiga on other existing systems, like Unix/Linux; greater are the possibilities of success for systems which are being created now, if their makers know the strong points of Amiga. An example is BeOS, a system loved by many Amiga users, for which some of our members already tought of an organization similar to ATO. Another is KOSH, a project which is starting right now, and which if continued will surely contain much of Amiga.
 
PettynATO:
We'll surely talk again about KOSH in these pages. Leaving the role of "MegaGalactic Director", I would like to ask to the man Marco De Vitis how much ATO and, on a more general level, Amiga did enrich you.
 
De Vitis^ATO
The answer is not easy, because it's not easy thinking how my life could have been without Amiga :-). First of all, I owe to Amiga the growth of my passion for computers, which will surely be useful to me in the near future. I see Amiga as an incentive to look at things from more points of view, and it surely contributed to my broad-mindedness. Moreover, I met Internet on the Amiga, so I owe to this system almost all of my computer knowledge, including all the interesting people I virtually met.
 
PettynATO:
These critical times exasperated the shattering of the Amiga concept, in such a way that you cannot define it univocally anymore without falling back in a subjective view. For some people Amiga represents simplicity, for others it is a nicely built silicon piece, for others it is an ideal, a mental habit... What does Amiga represent for you?
 
De Vitis^ATO
I'm rather practical and, after all, I think of Amiga simply as a computer. I think that what makes it unique is its being user-friendly, funny and instructive at the same time; we all know how many of the current programmers in the world have become what they are after having started thanks to Amiga. Everything about its "being different", in the way we mean it now (when it was first released it was "different" from other computers for its innovative features, but nowadays the reasons have changed), is something that took place afterwards, when Wintel systems began spreading more and, in spite of the introduction of many improvements in their system, they didn't succeed in equalling many Amiga features, making us even more proud of our "being different".
 
PettynATO:
Are you optimist about the future (of computer science, of the society, of AmiWorld... ;)?
 
De Vitis^ATO
I don't know, it's all so confused... let's say I'm not pessimist ;).
 
PettynATO:
My stomach quivers, the voice staggers: it's time for lunch! So, dear Marco, I leave to you the last words, and... keep on the good work, guys!
 
De Vitis^ATO
Thanks to you all for your reading, to AmiWorld for the interview and to Paolo Pettinato for his moral support :-).



Intervista by Paolo Pettinato
  Impaginazione by Joseph Lombardo

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paulpetty@iname.com		 [Made On Amiga]