Project of the Month - February 2008

Spanish (Spain) Language Files

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

In 2004, we founded Agensys Technology, a consulting company specializing in Business Intelligence, EPM and CRM solutions. After evaluating the state of the art in open source CRM solutions back then, we came to the conclusion that Sugar was (and still is) leading the pack, so we implemented it and became early adopters of SugarCRM 1.0.

The first translation was just part of an initiative to support and encourage its internal use in Agensys. Months later, a far more comprehensive translation was released to the public on SugarForge.

Almost four years later, Sugar is the core of our sales IT system, and it is improving and growing in some very interesting aspects such as campaign and email management, knowledge base support, dashboards and reporting, etc. So as we benefit from all those improvements, we try to give back a high quality Spanish translation.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

This has been my first and only SugarForge project, for the moment, besides a couple of i18n contributions.

What inspired you to create this project?

I've been involved in the Spanish translation of several open source projects, mostly as a hobbyist. I think it's a nice way of giving back to the community and at the same time broadening the target audience of a product by easing the learning curve for non-English speakers. Having developed some ad-hoc CRM solutions, I was familiar with part of the CRM terminology too.

And, of course, although we all know that Sugar looks great, personally I think it looks even better in Spanish :)

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

It all started with making our sales staff feel more comfortable with Sugar. But after releasing the first pack and getting feedback from the Spanish community, you realize that you are helping this product to enter the Spanish market, and that is a huge market with many country-specific language variations. It would be nice to build a common foundation for the translation of all the Spanish variations.

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in this language pack? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

Well, to be sincere, a language pack has no rocket science behind it. However, it is not easy to build a consistent translation, especially as it grows and incorporates new domain-specific terminology.

I'm focusing on improving the overall feel and consistency of the next language pack for Sugar 5.0, unifying some terms and expressions, looking for better translations of some particular terms and providing the user an Spanish interface which resembles what he is used to getting with the most popular applications. Some of the changes have been merged back to the Sugar 4.5.1 language pack, so expect a couple of new releases for Sugar 4.5.1 too (advanced users may prefer to download the latest sources of the pack right from the CVS repository, which always holds the ongoing work in its head branch and Sugar 4.5.1 modifications on its sugarcrm4 branch).

Finally, I would also like to compile a translation glossary to help the incorporation of new translators.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

New contributors are going to improve their skills and gain exposure and recognition as innovators, developers, translators, testers, etc. There are many ways to contribute to Sugar, you can develop an innovative solution (and make some money at applying one of the business models open source brings, such a pro edition at SugarExchange, support services, etc.), or just try to give your feedback and support to the existing developers. Anyway, at the personal level, it is very gratifying to see that your contribution as being useful to others.

And talking about translations, I think it's a good entry point to get involved in Sugar, because of the lack of requirements of highly technical skills. There is a lot of work to do, not just with the Sugar user interface itself, but with the translation of end user help, additional modules which have became quite popular, etc.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We have some ideas, in particular related to the monitoring aspects of the different sales stages of opportunities.

On the other hand, we are evaluating some internal developments on CRM analytics and mobility, two areas which are part of the core business of Agensys. Another interesting field is integration, as Sugar grows it feels more compelling to build some integration with existing solutions, and the widespread adoption of Service Oriented Architectures is setting the foundation for very interesting real time enterprise application integration.

To sum it up, we are looking for opportunities in the CRM area, and we think that Sugar is one of the fastest growing players in the market. So it's time for us to do a little more than use it internally for our own needs.