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Microsoft Forced To Translate Office Into Nynorsk
An anonymous reader writes "Beeb reports, "The main organisation working for the Nynorsk language got most of Norway's high schools to threaten to boycott all Microsoft software if they didn't come up with a New Norwegian version of Office." Which brings up questions for Open Source developers: What's involved in translating programs? Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier? Is there a group providing guidelines for this already? -- Do you work in program translation? Step up and do tell."
So I'm boycotting Microsoft, too, until they release Office for *nix.
In a sense, though, this is kind of what is supposed to happen with big customers.
But it is sad that the emphasis seemed to be getting MS software. They should have bought from whomever decided to provide the software in their language.
Oh well.
Someone with a better command of other languages can do the translations instead.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
Most Microsoft applications use the concept of resource to separate the text from the application, translating the application becomes then simply a matter of translating the strings in the resource and updating the binary.
Linux has something similar by using the gettext() function.
The hardest part is really translating correctly the text, taking into account the particularities of every language, the customs,... and obviously, keeping the translated version up to date.
GNU gettext already solves the problem of multi-lingual program messages. So the answer is, its easy to write multilingual programs
...albeit in honour of the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show: "Bork! Bork! Bork!" Take that, Bill Gates!
Quite simply, keep all your text in a seperate file which can be compiled completely seperately from the rest of your project. The goes for Dialogs, Menus, and Labels. This primarily makes it easier to allow users to switch from one language to another. :)
There really isnt that much that can be done other than that. What do you want us to say? Break your descriptions into simple enough language that some automatic translator can spit something out? I dont think so. Your best bet is to just keep all your text in one place, [aside from debugging messages or other things that the user is never supposed to see] so you won't have to go looking around for[and potentially miss] it when the time comes. Don't you hate it when the whole program is translated except for the one error message that it keeps giving you?
Of course documentation is a different story. Nothing you can do there except keep everything very well documented so that there will be less confusion in translation. If it's a complete idea instead of a quick phrase thrown out, it's more likely to be translated correctly.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
1) All strings should be centralized constants that are easy to replace in bulk.
2) Allow space in GUIs up front for the expansion that may result from translation.
Generaly, if a program is well-designed its not any harder to translate then a book, I mean, beyond issues of layout and the like.
Generaly what you do is put all the text in a file or compiled-in resource called a string-table. Then you refrence strings by their ID in the program, rather then their literal. When you want to ship to a diffrent country, you just swap the string table. (Although, you would probably want to include lots of tables for switching locals on the fly)
I'm certan microsoft uses this method with their software.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd like to point out that Microsoft usually does a great job of translating to other languages. Here in Mexico, Age of Empires was the hit multiplayer game. Everyone played it and nothing else. Why? It was the only game of its kind translated to spanish.
Woo-hoo!
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
For java developers.
I write a program to be translated into 5 languages. Fortunately, all were off the ASCII set, so no multi-byte char issues were present.
.dic file in, have a dialog that at runtime looks for .dic files, and you're done.
I came up with a enum file that held lines like:
enum phrases{
IDL_YES=0,
IDL_NO,
IDL_MAX_PHRASES};
Then a file for each language:
English.dic:
Yes
No
Spanish.dic:
Si'
No
etc... At runtime it loaded the last language configured or defaulted to English.
I also added support so you could use %s, %d, %x etc, so you can use them in sprintfs. It worked damn well. No need to re-compile. Just drop another
It worked extremely well. The only thing it coulf ever ned was milti-byte support, but as I said before that was not a requirement.
PLEASE PLEASE stay waway from the way that MS Dev Studio does it. It sucks ass.
Incedentally, the same class (I used a class when I could use C++) also works well for handling various dialects of SQL. MSSQLServer.dic, PostgreSQL.dic, etc....
Very simple and fast.
The only pain is that you have to come up with a unique IDL_name for each string. I'd like to have an associateive array so you could say
IDL("Yes") and have that translated. That was the next setp for me, but I never got the time to do that.
Hope that helps!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Norway has two official languages.. the one used by the majority of the people, called bokmål, and then another one called nynorsk. Not that they are two seperate languages or anything.. sort of like the difference between british english and american english, only a little more. This is because we were for quite a time, many years ago, in a union with denmark, and when the union broke, many norwegians felt they needed something that would seperate them a little from denmark (as denmark had been the bigger brother in the union, so to speak). Ivar Aasen roamed the countryside and created a new language on the basis of the many dialects norwegians spoke throughout the country.. this was the birth of nynorsk. However, nynorsk never prevailed, and now we're stuck with two languages.. much to the dismay of many norwegian students, because although very, very few speak nynorsk in the big cities, you still have to have exams in both different languages.. in some areas though, many speak nynorsk.. or at least close to it.. no one really speaks as they write bokmål and nynorsk. Close, but not quite.
Capitalism has a way of dealing with problems like this. If you dont like the product dont buy it and the company will either make it better or die. Its that easy. Dont fight for for your own version of the languadge. Dont buy it and althought you may suffer for a short tmie not having the software (yah right its only office) you will end up ahead in the long run.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Not even
Is this a Microsoft employee who just doesn't want to do any work? Err, that was redundant, sorry 'bout that.
Nanoo nanoo
Think about it... they want software in their language, and it's not available. So...
- If it's closed source (MS Office), don't buy something you don't want, and tell the company what you do want. It's called "market pressure."
- If the sofware is open source, you can translate it yourself -- and likely have working, native language software faster than a closed-source solution.
This is news because they managed to get Microsoft to support a language (spoken | written | read) by (relatively) few people. The only reason Microsoft probably even paid any attention to them was the threat they'd teach the children anything but Microsoft products.Would this have happened in the absence of open source? I doubt it. I guess that means open source is working. (Strange way for it to 'work' though...)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
why gaysexwithdogs is so unpopular, mod not down what you have not tried!
gaysexwithdogs legally? Or is it not kosher? It's not goysexwithdogs afterall.
into unaccouNTabull phony billyuns.
"Prospect theory argued that people's degree of pleasure depends more on their own subjective experience rather than objective reality, as the rational model of economics held.
A shopper, for example, might drive across town to buy a $10 calculator instead of a $15 one, but forgo the same trip to purchase a $125 jacket for $5 less, illogically believing the greater percentage saved on the calculator makes the trip more worthwhile.
Prospect theory led to ``loss aversion,'' which explained why investors clung to losing stocks rather than sell. Investors were more likely to sell stock they purchased at $50 a share if it rose to $70 and seemed overvalued; but if they bought the same stock at $90 and it fell to $70, they were disinclined to sell, even if shares still seemed overvalued.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Kahneman discussed the pitfalls of trying to beat the stock market, why he's worried about privatizing Social Security and other issues.
AP: In what ways do your theories explain the stock market downturn of the past three years?
Kahneman: Prospect theory helps explain biases of beliefs like ``optimistic overconfidence'' -- that people believe they can do what they in fact cannot do. When you have a situation where everybody believes they are above average, the markets are going to behave in a funny way.
And that was happening to a lot of people at the same time two to three years ago. There was a sense we were living in a new world. That always happens in bubbles. Bubbles tend to convince people this is something fundamentally new.
AP: Would you say the corporate accounting scandals contributed to the market bubble?
Kahneman: You'd expect in every bubble there would be a lot of crooks. It's hard to tell, I don't think the bubble itself was caused by the crooks. Things were happening, there was a readiness and willingness to believe in things, and then there were people who were taking advantage of them.
I'm not sure anybody can say somebody caused the bubble to occur or caused it to burst. Lots of people knew it was a bubble when it was going on. That's what we call ``delusion of control.'' And that is recurrent. People are surprised the bubbles collapse so quickly. They think prices will go down gently, and that will give them the hint and time to get out.
The psychology there is quite interesting. People have a lot of difficulty figuring out they are just like everybody else, and what they see, everybody else can see. And making allowances for the fact that you're one of many people looking at the same time.(ap)"
6 or 7 years ago, i worked as a trainee in a small company that translated MS software for french countrys. They may(probably) have changed they way of working, but they didn't use file
The fact that the 4.5 million Norwegians think they can make (or have to make) such a demand is, for what is mainly a quaint political issue, largely based on their oil-wealth.
For years now they have been fighting about what their language should be like and only because of this wealth can they afford to have several versions "official" at the same time.
And then they have major spelling changes on top of it!
Spoiled children they are..
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
"Microsoft Forced To Translate Office Into Nyorsk"
Did anyone else read this and instantly think that some judge on the antitrust case had been hitting the eggnog way hard when he handed out this 'pentalty'?
What's involved in translating programs?
:(
It's not just as simple as translation from English to some-other-language. It involves new character set, input method and association helpers, language-specific formatting etc. In the case of Chinese version, they even have to deal with different encoding methods support in one product.
As a developer I always find merely I18N support in Linux not enough to deal with all the language-specific problems. We've very little choice here. I can understand that without commercial drive it's very difficult to develop a language-specific product. E.g. majority of the fontset we need are not free.
that there is a need for translation, were are simply not as much a UScentric tech society as we once were, look for instance at the gaysexwithdogs sector. Not accepted here, but in china, very popular, they consider it 'priming' the meat before eating it.
In Norway nynorsk is an official language. Hence there have been attempts to try to get a Nynorsk version of MS-products. There have been no interest from MS until it came up good open source alternativs and even a special school-linux which supported nynorsk. Then the discussion on the lagality of using MS productions not supporting the official language nynorsk came up and probably made MS change their minds.
I read some years ago that Microsoft refused to make a 'nynorsk' version due to the high development cost. $3 million they claimed. A high price compared to the income they could expect returned from the small minorty that use 'nynorsk' in Norway.
This price seemed a bit to much for me. Gramaticaly the two norwegian written langauges differ little in actual grammar and sentence building. So word by word replacement should do most of the trick.
KDE and Gnome and their office like replacement apps have been available in both languages for a long time.
Guess the threat of working open source alternatives has forced MS into submition
An opensource project called Skolelinux (School Linux) is on its way to create a replacement for Windows for use in norwegian schools. Threatning the current MS monopoly one norways educational system.
IANAT (I am not a translator), but it's definitely a big job to translate something like Office into a whole new language.
We're not just talking about translating every menu item, tooltip, dialog prompt, and error message for something like a half-dozen major applications -- there are thousands of pages of documentation/on-line help that also need to be translated. And as I recall the help system uses some AI to allow natural language queries which would obviously need to be "translated". Also, don't forget that Office is a special case because it has a grammar and spell-checker that are fairly language-dependant.
Of course, every single change to any text needs to be proofed, and the testing has got to be an enormous job. It's possible that they have to test everything in every language to make sure that all the words in things like dialog boxes fit in the space allotted to them.
This is all made even worse for a language that has very few speakers because would it be hard to find qualified translators.
I once asked somebody at MS why they don't implement seemingly trivial features, and he went on to explain that it would have to be tested, localized (i.e. translated into every language), added to the documentation by a technical writer (which would then need to be localized as well), have help topics written for it (also localized), etc. Thus, a feature that might take only an hour to code could cause hundreds of hours of work due to all the languages that all text needs to be translated into.
I suppose I should also add that all text strings referenced by a localized program are stored in a separate text file which gets compiled into an executable (EXE/DLL) as a string table, so it's not like the translators have to deal with source code. But still, these programs have probably thousands of strings which must be translated in context (i.e. the translator may need to know how the string is used in the program) so they can't just take a list of phrases and go to work.
"Master, master, does it hurt?" To which the oldman replied, "No, it never hurts." The student cried, "but I swear it hurt." Master retorted, "Gaysexwithdogs never hurts, but you were in SOVIET RUSSIA, where dogs hav Gaysexwithyou!"
I'm sure the Norwegians can handle the English version of Office just fine.
Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English -- many people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, speak it better than many US people do, and definitely better than people from any other (non-native English speaking) country.
I think the fluency in English for Scandanavians arises from the similarity of English to the Scandavian languages, so picking it up is natural, much more so than other European languages, and of course, better than any non-Western language.
But in any case, not having Norwegian Office is not as a big of a cripple to productivity as the article may lead you to think.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
we've had our dark daze, our wild existence. they broke their promise, (now we're tolled), so keep your distance.
sum of IT's about robbIE's meteoric rise to payper "wealth", & the heretofor unmentionabull "obligations" that goo with IT. they thought they might pull a "fast won" on the "BiG guise". 'course we haven't heard of any giaNT ?pr? banner ADs for robbIE, over at MSNasty.
so, don't cry for robbIE, because he made his owned choices. no mention of the va L word here, so mod appropriately.
happy happy gnu year, IT's around 40 up on the pacific crest.
Where I used to work, our whole project had a string table that would be referenced whenever user interaction was required. Simple file with symbols tob english words.
Then, we took that file, and sent it to professional translating companies (in XML), and they'd send us back a result. Stick in the file, and your done.
I have given a presentation in OSCon 2002 and a paper in ICOS 2002 that addressed these problems in the context of Perl-based web applications. The paper is also available in Chinese.
For an example of the scale and progress of their projects, see here.
Its all part of their huge research drive into Natural Language Processing. They do world-class research and have some great innovations to their name. Perhaps the one which will prove most useful is MindNet.
Computational Linguistics is the BIG growth area, and it seems that Microsoft isn't going to miss the party.
Do you still think business works with some idealistic crap like capitalism? It's about extortion and mafia tactics! See for yourself.
I have given a presentation in OSCon 2002 and a paper in ICOS 2002 that addressed these problems in the context of Perl-based web applications. The paper is also available in Chinese.
I worked in a Office product group as an intern. MSFT does NOT translate products themselves, but outsources it to third parties (big players in this service market include Uniscape, etc).
MS handles the I18N (internationalization) aspect of their product (support for different character sets/code pages, formatting, right-to-left input, etc... this is the stuff that needs to be handled in the program code itself) but the actual translation (L10N -- localization... this stuff can be handled by simply editing resource files, as pointed out earlier) is done by a outside translation house.
I can't imagine that Nynorsk would have many new I18N issues that haven't been dealt with already in previous international versions of office (it uses Roman script, right?), and therefore the burden of translation would be up to whichever company is interested in translating Office. So, the Norwegians should identify a company, and get Microsoft to give the translation business to that company, rather than having MSFT do it themselves, which is not the way it works.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
into sum kind of ill eagle stock markup, hostage ransom, payper liesense FUDgePeddler's po'diem.
way to goo lairy/robbIE. many are saying they/we were duped buy the kingdumb. that's not hard to imagine, as they're soooo shrewed.
you'd still be best counseled, to run for your options, should you have any left, up on the pacific crest, @around 40.
What's involved in translating programs? Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier? Babel Fish [altavista.com] Did you know masturbate, according to Babel Fish, is the same in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish? I wonder if the porn industry had their hands in this. Pardon the pun.
I hope no inner-city councilors get wind of this or we may be treated to Ebonics language versions of MS products.
Try: http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
Fizzile:
I needz a new one of dis shit!
You bes' open this file befo' I pop a cap in yo azz!
Get rid o' dis shit, nigga!
Sizzave dis, fuh real!
No, biznitch, save it as dis!
Damn, ho, I wants dis to be a Wizzeb pizzage!
I needz to gets my search on!
What dis Wizzeb pizzage shitz look like, boo?
Yo, print dis shit mah way. You ain't disrespectin', is you!?
What dis shit look like?
Sizzend dis shit to all mah homiez!
Prizzopertizzies.
I'ze gonna pop a cap in yo nigga azz if yo don't let me outta dis bitch!
The GNOME Translation Project
KDE i18n project
Translation howto for kannada - This is a howto I wrote yesterday for people wanting to translate their language into kannada(an indian language spoken in karnataka). But the concept applies to all indian languages & other languages too to a certain extent. [OK, I confess some self interest is involved here :-)]
Actually, kannada support came first on windows XP thanks to the karnataka govt support & since MS & Adobe developed opentype fonts(must for complexity of indian languages), but thanks to the Pango team, we hope to have support before MS does. And many state govts in India are also pressurising MS to bring Win XP in their languages and already bengali,hindi & tamil(kde is fully translated into tamil.) are in the works. But, we hope to set it right, soon.
MANY of larry/rob's ?pr? bots, are volunteers. none so dedicated they say.
/. is NOT about money/stock markups, or really anything profitable, for US.
LIEk msn et AL, no matter what, the "storIE" is, the scriptdead "dialogue" is always around: "my, how gooed the FUDge tastes again today".
robbIE's BiG draw, is that he still lets stuff about goat sex, & other trivial text, get buy. he's been a hard won on this "business", stock markup stuff dough.
fortunately/conveniently, we all "learned" early&often, that
show US the books lairy. remember, "open"? 0, right, that only appLIEs to stuff that's NOT about money.
happy happy gnu year, to the "keepers" of the kode. IT doesn't get any better than this?
we note that post/php-nuke bloggerware comes with avantgo(tm) & translates the "nuked" site into dozens of languages, right off the "shelf". when someone from a non-nuked country calls in, someone else almost inevitably, writes a version for them. their only deficit, as far as we can see, may be letting lairy et AL, be the "keeper", of their kode. now that's dangerous.
volunteers. sheesh.
Microsoft are ignoring a very large part of their users, mainly script kiddies.
All 13 year olds should boycott them until windoze is translated into 313375p34k!
(At least that'd get rid of the DDoS attacks on IRC Networks)
Well the situation in Norway is quite interesting, because there is already a switch from Microsoft licenses to Linux in the education system. In fact, the state has sponsored a project called "Skolelinux" (SchoolLinux), where Norwegian/Nynorsk/Same language editions are being made based on the Debian operating system. One of the reasons why it was started was obviously the lowered costs, but also the ability to have more native language output. The site is at www.skolelinux.no but I think it's only in Norwegian...
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
i don't see any big stock markup ipo in the WINgs for these guise. they'll probably all starve, if they don't quick cut a "deal" for some (more) corepirate banner ADs.
maybe they'll (lairy&bill) call IT WINdsux? LIEdose? doesn't look like they'll be calling it Lindows, right away.
too bad, that would have made a great "spin off", with which to priNT up billyuns more in phony payper, @40, on the pacific crest.
Mod points? I don't need no stinkin' mod points!
some are saying the plans for the /. ipo, are waning, despite an infusion of billyuns in proformulah ad revenue.
so, it might be almost time for you benevolent bloggers to consider how to help keep rob/lairy from becoming "victims" of corepirate absorption/stock markup failure. a few buks won't hurt you, in order to help out. everybody who paid 150$ a share for their lairybuks, may consider themselves paid up through february.
whatever happens dough, we must NOT discuss this stuff, as we remember from our previous training: money doesn't matter to US, so it's important for US to give IT to LIEforms who think differently/knead it.
To fully support all languages, including Asian, there really is no alternative - the UNICODE format. That, and sticking to the use of tables for strings, menus etc.
One of the major correct things Microsoft did some time ago was realize this - hence for most of their products a different resource file is all that's needed to support another language (I'm ignoring help files etc.). IMHO, it's a great pity that the Linux system didn't realize this earlier (especially as it was written in a non English language country).
Since I'm currently working in China, this has become a very important issue, more so to me because I am designing a natural language scripting tool that has to understand both Chinese characters and syntax. Whilst we may find some translations by the Chinese into English funny, it's just because English (to them) is as foreign as Chinese is to us. All of us English speakers should realize that just because C/C++/Python etc. make sense to us, they don't to others. It's just not reasonable to say, well, if you want to learn programming, then you must learn English first.
Using Cocoa under Mac OS X, and Project Builder (free download from http://connect.apple.com ), the process is very easy. You can build different GUI files for different languages if you like, and use different plists for the different strings. Different widgets exists so that fields are displayed according to internationalised preferences too.
Often a speaker of another language will do the translation, and send the files to the developer for inclusion (this happens all the time). It really is that simple. And of course the entire application appears as just a single icon in the finder, so the end user doesn't have to worry about keeping their resource files with the application when moving the application around.
The parent post speaks the truth. Most norwegians can handle the English versions of software without spending extra brainpower. I am from Norway and I've used English versions of Windows, Office and lots of other software without any problem.
:-)
In many technical situations using the non-translated version is often easier than having to deal with the sometimes flaky translation of English technical terms.
If you have a translated version of Windows 2000, take a look at the explanation for the different counters you can measure in the system performance graphing utility. There are many dubious translations that can cause confusion there, at least in the Norwegian version. Example: "Flytende emuleringer/sek" means in norwegian what "Liquid emulations/sec" means in english. The original text was probably "Floating point emulations/sec"...
(By the way, who the f!ck runs big bloated Windows 2000 on a computer so old it doesn't have floating point in hardware??)
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right! =)
I would like to remind you that Karl Ove Hufthammer has been translating AbiWord into Nynorsk for some time.... Why doesn't someone point these things out much earlier!?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
There's no need to translate OSS. Any user can access the source code, type in his own translation, and recompile.
YAY
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
These two 'languages' may be labeled as seperate langauges, but the written difference between them is in no real league above UK vs US written English. The total expense to Microsoft would be trivial even for a small software company.
Microsoft's policy people probably saw "Norwegian language Norwegians speak" and "Norwegian language only a few rural Norwegians speak" and immediately chose the former without considering the sensitivities. Nyorsk is like art and ballet; few people have time for them, but think it nice and highly important to know they're there.
When you translate an application it is not just translating text strings in it. You also obviously need to update documentation, online help, etc. This, as a lot of people have pointed out, is "simply" a matter of changing text strings that are external the the main source code, and referenced by the application throughout the code.
However, as well as translating text to another language, there is a lot more work to be done. Images in the interface may need to be changed, sounds used in the application, etc, may also need to be modified for the appropriate localisation. The entire user interface must be examined for culturally specific items and they need to be modified for the appropriate target market.
To allow for localisation, an application should be internationalised as it is written. How this is best accomplished is determined by the Operating System you're writing for. Most operating systems will have internationalisation features to some extent.
For example, applications written using Cocoa for Mac OS X are easily designed for localisation at a later date. Looking inside any Mac OS X Cocoa (and some Carbon applications that use packages) you will see folders named "English.lproj", "French.lproj", etc (inside Contents/Resources). These folders are how Mac OS X can automatically localise things. Any application written using the guidelines posted by Apple is ready to be localised without any changes to the code. All that needs to happen is the modifications to the interface resource files, this can include changing the complete layout of dialog boxes, as well as simple translation of text strings.
Overall, any application should be coded as if it will be internationalised. Even if you do not intend to do internationalisation, it enforces separation between the code and the interface and resources, which is almost always a good idea.
Okay, okay, this is offtopic. But I do have a question, and maybe you can answer it.
My brother told me something that I never thought could be tested.
Politically, he's a believer in the different branches of government: the congress [power of the people] the Senate [power of ethnic groups], the presidency [power of the charismatic leader], the judges [power of wise counsel], the media [power of information], and the purchased house [power of money].
Anyhow, he said that if you ignore one branch or another, or if the branch is rendered incapable, then you risk the country's failure in one way or another. Usually, it is that the ignored branch overwhelms the rest of the government (as $$$ are overwhelming the US government).
But specifically, he said that the effect of not having a Senate, or having an ineffective Senate, was that you got the Babel effect: people recreated their language to separate themselves.
Well, I knew that language got recreated -- but I didn't ever see a specific test case until now. But now I see one, so let me ask: Did Norway/Denmark not have a Senate, or was it somehow rendered ineffective?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Language packs. Have each prompt and piece of text be dynamically linked to an external language link. Either integratable at compile time, in which a simple copying of a new language pack then recompile will do you, or just have it do it on the fly. I know this is being done on several projects, including the emulator Kawaks...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Most people will say that the two letter language code for norwegian is 'no'. But if we have two norweigan languages there must be two seperate codes. Some programs use 'nb' for norwegian "bokmål" and 'nn' for norwegian "nynorsk".
So, are the locales for e.g. the bokmål variant supposed to be stored in /usr/share/locale/nb or /usr/share/locale/no?
The user interface in OpenOffice[1] has already been translated tof o.html.en )
t ml?articleID=429959
Nynorsk by The Linux for School project and tre regions in Norway. The
total translation effort with quality insurance will take arround 4500
hours. (some older project-info in English
http://developer.skolelinux.no/projectin
Microsoft Norway tells one of the major newspapers[2] that The Linux
for School project has nothing to do with the fact that the user
interface in Office 11 will be translated into Nynorsk by the summer
2003.
MS Norway told Norsk mållag (an organisation which promote norwegian
language) in april 2000 that translating would cost 30.000.000
norwegian kroner (4.100.000 Euro). After som debate MS told that
translating would cost 10.000.000 NOK (1.370.000 Euro). Translation
will cost around 2-3.000.000 NOK (275.000-412.000 Euro) was the
message when Microsoft announced they should translate the user
interface in Office 11 to Nynorsk 5. nov 2002.
Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes, the main translator of KDE to Nynorsk, are
altso working full time whith translating OpenOffice to Nynorsk. In
may 2000 Gaute was rewarded with a price (Flower of Dialect) for his
voluntary work for the norwegian language from Norsk mållag.
[1] http://www.openofficeorg.no/
[2] http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/nett/article.jh
[3] http://developer.skolelinux.no/openoffice/
I thought this very same thing.
And why would this be funny? OTOH, there's a lot of posts with jokes that don't go modded as funny... Is this "funny" label automatically given or what?
Why can't Microsoft translate it's software and operating systems so they use the correct spelling for other English-language speaking countries? The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all use what's often referred to as International English, where spelling differs from U.S. English. Examples: Colour (not color), Favourites (rather than favorites), Network Neighbourhood (rather than neighborhood).
For all their expertise in internationalisation, it seems that Microsoft still can't manage this. Is it a question of cost and convenience? Some of their more specialised software, such as Encarta, has been properly localised, but probably because they promote this heavily as a resource for schools. How many U.S. users would be happy with an operating system and applications that used, say, UK spellings? Not many I'd venture to guess. But it's not just Microsoft, the last time I installed Mandrake Linux, the default install only offered U.S. English.
There wasn't any Senate during the Norway/Denmark union. It was a Monarchy, with the danish king as the Monarch.
Also, the Norwegian system has a Parlament, Government and Courts. No Senate.
The split happened because most people in the cities were more 'cosmopolitan' and incorporated the ruling languages (over a couple of hundred years), while the people stuck in the rural areas kept their dialects.
When Norway split with Denmark, there was a strong national feeling, and people where trying to find the 'real' norwegian. Nynorsk came out of those tries. Problem was, most of the educated class already knew Norwegian (bokmål), and didn't see a reason to switch. Basically, Norwegian (bokmål) was already there, and people didn't want to switch for the sake of switching.
Je ne parle pas francais.
If you have used the Visual Studio method of resource strings for i18n and you are moving to .NET I would strongly recommend you review how i18n resources work in .NET before you get into your project. The paradigm has changed, especially if you have multiple threads in a worker pool.
.Net always have fallbacks. So in the above case the users thread would first ask for the Bokmal(nb-NO) version of the resource and if it wasn't there it would then fallback to the Norwegian (NO) version of the string and then fallback to my default resource file. (English en for me).
.Net app and I already had a Norwegian (NO) resource file (resmain.no.resx - a plain text XML file) I would copy the file to resmain.nb-NO.resx (Bokmal) and another copy as resmain.nn-NO.resx (Nynorsk). You can then pick and choose which resources you actually want to be different between them.
(Stop Reading because the Microsoft sales force has now taken over my brain...)
Resource Strings in
(more marketing BS...)
If this were my
FYI:
no = Norwegian (x0014) (20)
nb-NO = Norwegian Bokmal (x0414) (1044)
nn-NO = Norwegian Nynorsk (x0814) (2068)
I translated Uropa 2 - The Ulterior Colony, an Amiga game, to Swedish on behalf of Vulcan Software.
One thing that I seem to remember causing problems was that occasionally, there were individual words in the separate translation file that were sometimes reused in multiple places, with assumptions being made about where that could happen based on what works in the English language. That is as definite no-no. Don't assume that an English word which can mean several things also has an identical word in a foreign language.
Also, don't assume that foreign languages have an easy way to change between singular and plural or that as in English, there is only one article for all nouns.
In conclusion, always give the translator the option to choose the exact wording based on the context -- even if that means that the English (or whichever is the original language of your software) version of the resource file has many words duplicated. What works in one place may not work in another, even if that is the case with your language.
Did Norway/Denmark not have a Senate, or was it somehow rendered ineffective?
Yes.
This is one thing that I can agree with MS on. Nynorsk is wierd. Bokmal is much better.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Here's the first google result on the Microsoft refusal to translate:
http://www.informationcity.org/teleco
I dont have a
Comments from GNOME knowledable people is also welcome--does GNOME have a similar page of statistics on translations as KDE?
It is not always that simple. Remember that dates & numbers can change too. Many C++ programs defaut to the dot as decimal separator. Do Copy-paste to a French version of Excel and thy areth f*****.
Golden tip: if you convert numbers to strings for clipboard, files and other non-screen places, use the format "00000000E+00". This writes numbers without decimal or thousands separators, and most software (e.g. spreadsheets) will convert it back nicely before showing it to the user.
A separate file is a good beginning.
Here are a few other things that really help:
Foreign words tend to be longer than their English equivalents. Double available space for captions.
A routine that walks a form and grabs all component names and captions. It then throws these up in a grid and lets the user translate them.
A TranslateForm procedure that uses info from above.
Don't forget reports. If you have something that can also crawl reports on the fly, that is a huge timesaver.
It also helps to wrap some common ShowMessage and InputBox functions in something like ShowMessageTranslate, etc.
I do a lot of RAD projects, and the last thing you want to do is burn up mental cpu's with translation issues when you are in the heat of getting something to work. Spend some time on these issues beforehand by writing or using good utilities.
If anybody wants it, I have written a complete package for Delphi. There are better and worse on the web, I know mine works. ghelmke@online.no
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
This is why GUI's should not written using fixed coordinates. Instead, size-adaptive GUI's should be the norm.
That will work in most cases, but then how do you expect to fit larger foreign text on a fixed-size PDA screen? Put scroll bars on dialog boxes? Spend beaucoup bucks redesigning every dialog box in the program?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Skolelinux project is a major effort to provide office and other software in both versions of Norwegian as well as in the minority language of Northern Sami.
In addition it will provide a very ambitious Debian Woody based thin client school network with a lot of network services. Somewhat similar to the K12LTSP project.
Take a look at Mozilla i18n & L10n Guidlines and Netscape ToolCool. These projects allow mozilla to be localized without recompilation of binaries. Local language data is kept in a seperate data store that the application can pull from. Translating the app is just a matter of adding the language to the database. Seems logical and simple.
TECMATIC - Intelligent Technology News
Try this instead Developer pages in English, and if interested, have a look at the architecture.
I'm in the process of translating as much as possible of this material into English.Congratulations, you have just reinvented (a small part of) GNU gettext package! Seriously, why not just use existing and much better solutions? ... you don't have any licensing issues
GNU gettext is licensed under the viral GNU General Public License, which precludes its use in proprietary software or in free software under a GPL incompatible license. I don't know whether or not gettext provides an exception (couldn't find it in two minutes on Google without actually downloading the entire package), and even then, I'm not sure that even the GPL with the exception used in the Guile and libgnat licenses would be compatible with some viral but not "free" licenses such as the APSL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wonder if the Norwegians set a deadline for MS
How about "before our kids become too familiar with OpenOffice.org, which we are deploying in schools as you read this?" How would Microsoft react to such a formulation of a deadline?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was a tester on Ericsson's first smart phone project.
Although they approached the problem of enabling easy translation of displayed strings by using resource files, etc (this was enabled by the Symbion OS, which strongly encourages such practice), we ran into two major problems:
1. Buffer over/underruns -- if a programmer had created a string (e.g., menu), they would allocate four characters to store that string, but often the German equivalent would be, say, 50 characters, which would cause a crash.
2. The smart phone had a relatively small screen (compared to a PC). The UI designers were working in English and designed the entire UI using English words. They didn't pay enough attention to the fact that translation would be required. For languages that tend to have longer words than English (e.g. German), this caused significant problems. These translations wouldn't fit in the allocated space, and the screen would be cluttered with text.
It would be nice to see software engineers working on UI toolkits to take problems like this into account. Ideally, applications (and GUI toolkits) should be designed in a language-neutral way. Application programmers, who typically think in terms of logic and who strive for elegance, aren't really the best sort of people to be considering language translation. It would be desirable for GUI toolkits to degrade gracefully when presented with text that doesn't fit the UI design and which does not let programmers make the buffer over/underrun mistake. It would seem likely that such a framework exists, but it doesn't seem to be ubiquitous.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
What's involved in translating programs? Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier?
We recently hired a translating company to translate the strings of a project into several languages - and found out gettext's po files were too "complicated" for them (apparently some people are scared of anything ASCII).
Since the project is using Qt anyway, I converted it to using Qt's translation mechanisms, and gave them a CD that boots a basic Linux system with Qt Linguist -- they could handle that.
I suppose if we want more translators to help us out, we need a similar tool for po files - any volunteers for hacking up Qt Linguist to support both formats?
If you don't read any kind of Norwegian, you'd better try this link: Info in English
I'm sorry but translating it into norsk for only a fraction of 4.5 million people is simply not worth it. For MSWORD instance, A whole new spellcheck and thesarus would need to be created. Not only that but when it comes to punctuation and correction of language such as Could Not or Couldn't I just reckon it would take a LOT of work, what you do guys think? Not just a simple search and replace.
I wonder what the Norse word for "monopoly" might be?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Now that wouldnt be a bad thing would it?
Translation Management Guide is a PDF file. More docs here
Norway is split...Two languages, altough they're pretty much the same. Nynorsk is about 30-35% of the people. However the organizations did not make about any high scool threaten microsoft. They made around the half. This is not that easy either...Earlier MS said that it would be to expencive, and that they would not earn in again.... Now they've changed they'r minds. I do think that it is in main due to that Skulelinux (In norwegian...) has translated Linux to Nynorsk, and even made their own distorbution. When MS saw that tthere was some schools that wanted to test out Skulelinux (Schoollinux), tehy got afraid, and decided that it might be better to translate it...Maybe the schools will realise that it is better and that even bokmaal schools will use Linux...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
For translating KDE programs into Turkish I ( and %99.9 of other translators ) use KBabel which helps you edit GNU style *.po files.
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
maybe they need excel too
"What's involved in translating programs? Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier?"
s is only a part of the solution. It doesn't address dealing with languages that draw radically differently.
There are only about a million good books on this old topic. Weren't most of us asking this question in 1995 when MS suggested the resource-DLL trick in a KnowledgeBase article? OK, maybe 1995 was when us really slow people finally became interested. For example, the Mac crowd was interested even earlier. And other people were interested even earlier.
Why not submit to AskSlashDot something like: "I need to convert from dec to hex, and amazingly sometimes back the other way! What's involved? What makes it easier? Step up and share!"
BTW: the store-anything-translatable-in-resource-only-DLL'
I think that for the next thing I write which needs localization...I'll have the project store only the English resources and then dynamically translate by using winsock to do an http request against Babelfish at runtime. It'll have a more realistic feeling to it. For example, when I buy something made in China with English instructions I expect it to have really bad translation and don't want to be disappointed.
Shouldn't this be on Ask Slashdot?
so why bother? can't we all just talk the same language?
Gecko Based programs, Mozilla, Phoenix, Komodo, etc use .dtd and .properties files to store all keyboard shortcuts and UI text. All one has to do is open those files in their favorite text editor and translate them. Of course, you also need to point the program to a system font for your particular language as well.
Most people would also be surprised to know that the largest english speaking country is China. America makes up a very small part of the total english speaking world.
Except for software that actually processes words where the algorithms are geared for English, e.g., word processors (word selection for non-Roman languages or those that go right-to-left), search engines (the Porter word-stemming algorithm).
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
For a while I have been trying to prod the Microsoft people to make a bigger commitment to being an open platform. Having the source code is not that big a deal for me, I would much rather someone designed a system that allowed me to extend it without having to rewrite existing code than have someone just dump source on me.
This is one of the reasons why Apache has been such a success, it is Open Source, sure, but the real benefit is you can extend Apache with modules and you don't have to grovell through every arcane detail of Apache to write 'em.
There are plenty of tools for editing resource files. If Microsoft provided some documentation they could make it possible for people to develop their own language customized versions of Office etc.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Consider my ongoing project to translate Nethack into something resembling Spanish. Gettext offers support for plurals, but not for gender; it provides no way to make sure that a blessed sword (espada) is bendita, but a blessed helmet (yelmo) is bendito. Languages with noun cases, such as German, Finnish, and Russian, have an additional problem: a monster is a subject when it hits you and a direct object when you hit it. Furthermore, sometimes Nethack must parse user input, as when making a wish, and differing word order and words with more than one meaning create lots of pitfalls there. Finally, Nethack is laden with jokes and puns, and many of these don't survive translation.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Would that it be so simple...
What you (and others) state above is certainly necessary, but not really sufficient for many applications.
Imagine the string "Do something from %s to %s" in your translation file. If the target language presents the arguments in the same language as English, then you win, otherwise things are backwards (sometimes the localizer can re-write using this 'unnatural' order, but not all languages are as flexible as English in this respect).
I've seen shipped code (in English) "Processing 30 of 14..." where the 2nd number incremented (I believe this was some Sony image processing software, but it was so long ago...).
And that assumes that there is only one ambiguous pair and nothing like "Give %d %s(s) to %s on %s".
Also, sometimes programmers get clever with strings like:
"Do something with 1 item"
"Do something with %d items"
forgetting that some languages would need this expanded for 2, 3 & instead of 1 & . And let's hope that the items that you're counting are all the same gender in the target language.
For example with days of the week: English has no gender, most romance languages have them all masculine, but Italian has the all masculine except for Sunday which is feminine. And let's not get started on non-roman script languages... And, yes, this can be important if you're writing an application that deals with scheduling and appointments.
My point is, gettext() is only the beginning. You also need to structure your display code differently and use something other than printf's. Because of this, localization can be somewhat hard.
And the bottom line is, doing it properly is 'hard' enough that most programmers don't bother doing it.
IANAN (I am not a Norwegian):
:)
;)) Norway has two languages that are almost identical: Bokmaal and Nynorsk. The first is practically a clone of Danish. Nynorsk rose from Norwegian Nationalism and Ivar Aasen when they received independence from Sweden in the early 20th century. It is like someone made a language out of English dialects. It is supposed to be closer to what Vikings spoke (though Icelandic would be a better representation). Most Norwegians write in Bokmaal but the Nynorsk contingent is very adamant about official and equal representation of their brand of Norwegian.
Til Nordmenn: Fordi jeg er ikke en nordmenn rettelse alt at er feil
For those that aren't up on Norwegian linguistics, (not that I am a scholar or anything
What is ironic is most of the words are exactly the same or so similar that anyone who is proficient can read both. A few examples follow:
Norge Noreg
Jeg Eg
It is important because both languages are treated equally, but it is mostly irrelevant because they are so similar.
--Joey
... is not as simple as I thought it would be.
Currently I am involved (for the first time) in localizing a very complex product (sells for about 150,000).
While we have a nice (actually free) product to look at the GUI elements while translating them, the messages of the product come with no context.
In all modesty I can claim to know this product better than anybody else in my country (the product was developed overseas but I was in touch with the developers almost from inception). Nevertheless without context I sometimes have no clue what some messages are supposed to mean.
I would be surprised if this problem had already been tackled in the OpenSource World, if so please prove me wrong. (Disclaimer: I haven't been involved in localizing OpenSource products. My own stuff I write with an English GUI anyway).
From my experience I'd say that there is more to a localization framework than a central place to store all messages and GUI texts.
The latter is indispensable to be able to localize the software at all, but it does not make for a comfortable straightforward translation process.
For each message there should be context information that tells the translator under what circumstances the message string will appear for the user. Without this information a certain percentage of your translation will always end up being guesswork (depending on the complexity of the product).
Happy 2003 to all.
Maybe there should be a Customize feature. When the app is compiled with the customize flag, then, say, the windows key, would be claimed for a special feature. If you have something selected in any way (menu, tilebar, whatever) and you press the customize key, then a dialog opens that allows you to type in the new text, choosing both the font and the size (style too?). This saves a resource file that can be used with a normally compiled version of the program. And will be remembered the next time the app is used, also.
This would allow anyone, not just a programmer, to customize the apps. In fact, it would allow people to replace "file" with "store" in just because they liked the sound better. (So it would become important for resource file formats to be standardized across versions. Or to provide update utilities.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier?
Yes. Learn English. It makes things wondrously easy.
Seriously, do these people think they're doing school kids a favor? Educating them in a language used in one part of Norway?
I am a developer in the Microsoft Office team, so I know what I'm talking about here. We localize all our strings with internal proprietary tools which are very flexible and easy to use. The localization is done all around the world.
e e/intb0 1.htm
0 3.htm for a good description of how you can customize what languages you have installed to create documents in.
Microsoft Office supports Nynorsk, in the sense that you can write documents in it. However, (at least for Office XP) the list of supported languages which you can get the UI in can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/thr
See http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/three/intd
How much will it cost Microsoft in translation to support the Nynorsk language is not something I can disclose, but the support cost is probably more expensive than you think.
Microsoft isn't "forced" to do anything. Microsoft's people simply do what they are required to do to make products and sell them _for a profit_.
This for a profit part is the reason that Microsoft still exists... The other reason is the incredable vision of the founders of the company.
For the people using "bokmål", which is 85%+ of the primary schools (didn't find any statistics for the population), there already is a native Office version. And yes, most people would also not have a big problem using english but the difference between the norwegian languages are minimal, they are two because of historical and not liguistic reasons. This is about a small (but very vocal) minority (if 15% is accurate for the entire population, 6-700,000 people), and they get fewer year by year.
Also, the blackmail threat is rather hollow as most other software packages don't bother to support both either. Personally I think it's a bad business decision by Microsoft, but that's just my opinion. Personally I use all my software in english, most of my textbooks are in english and I look at (US) english TV shows, movies and DVDs without subtitles. Personally I think that not only is Nynorsk redundant, but that both norwegian languages are rather redundant, but I don't suppose you'll find much support in the general population for that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anyway, I'm having a hell of a time using gettext with 'msgid's that contain accents, umlauts, ß, and other stuff.
Cheers, Jens
Home Page
Speaking from direct personal experience, the problem of porting an application from one language/country to another is far, far more than just translating some words or phrases.
A widely distributed application (geographically speaking) needs to be built around the idea of porting from the start, so not only the words and phrases in the UI, but the layout of dialog boxes, the use of things like currencies, dates and times, and even the assumptions about where users will naturally look to find things must be considered.
Consider how much effort would be required to take a typical Windoze or Linux app developed for an English-speaking Western audience, and adapt it for use in, say, India. You have to cater to a whole new alphabet or two, for a start. Quick, switch to Unicode! Oh, but the Japanese normally use MBCS. So now we have to rewrite all the text I/O routines to cope not just with different vocabulary, but with different character representations as well. Then you have languages where text is written right-to-left (except when it's not) or vertically. And of course, you'd better reverse all the control layout on your dialogs for R-to-L readers, and probably redesign them completely for vertical presentation. And don't forget to make sure it's wide enough for that 47 letter German word to fit while you're doing it, where the paragraph broke neatly in English or French.
I could go on for a long time about this, and the various techniques you might employ to do it, but the point is that even presenting an application with the text in a different language involves far more than just translating some text. Internationalisation -- designing your app for portability -- takes only a tenth of the effort required for localisation -- adapting the results so they actually make sense in your target culture.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For what it's worth, this was one of few things X-windows libs tried to do right. And what Java does right, and HTML sort-of does (ie. dynamic aspects much more limited, but at least text flow is dynamic, can use non-pixel-based sizes etc). And I'd assume Qt/GTK can do it too?
Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English -- many people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, speak it better than many US people do, and definitely better than people from any other (non-native English speaking) country.
I think the fluency in English for Scandanavians arises from the similarity of English to the Scandavian languages, so picking it up is natural, much more so than other European languages, and of course, better than any non-Western language.
Non-native English speakers spell it "Scandinavia". He he.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The runtime gettext support (libintl) is distributed under the LGPL.
Twirlip of the Mists has claimed that even the LGPL is incompatible with the APSL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
?Gnumeric?
No Excel.
Gnumeric?
Ex...cel.
Gnu...meric.
Ex!
Gnu!
Cel!
Meric!
GNU!
uhm,
Meric!
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I need them to translate Office into hic. I live in the country.
The way it works in open source projects is similar but with a twist. If there are enough people who want to have a certain application in their language they will have to get together and start working on the translation. The way this works for most applications is through using the gettext library to produce POT files. That is, all output strings are extracted into a file which the translator can then work on. This way, the translators don't have to interact with the source code.
To make things even better, tools that can manipulate those files have been developed, such as KBabel and gTranslator. Even Emacs has a PO mode.
An example of this is the Arabeyes Project, which is the official translation team for both Gnome and KDE interfaces.
Have you ever seen the hot ass women that come out of the nordic areas (Norway, Sweden, Finland, ...). Go to Epcot and you'll see (it's cheaper than going there).
Esperanto!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
WARNING: Translating code is the most menial task since data input. Not for the faint hearted or those of you looking for a quick distraction from, er, computer science projects due soon.
/. journal shortly, brings back memories], and then with a genealogy program that came in French. The translation wasn't to English, but here are two things I will tell you
Alright, now, to my humble expericence:
Back in 2001 or so I began using the MacOS as a testing ground. For those of you playing the home game, before OS X, each file consisted of a "resource fork" and a "data fork." This is part of the filesystem pain that made my highschool work impossible to take home: mac files use the proprietary resource fork for things like icons, filetype information (whoot, I love NOT needing extensios) and menu information.
To make the story short, I used Res[ource]Edit to peek the contents of strings that go in menus and dialog boxes, and if you know the Mac OS, it's NO DOS! So plenty of valuable data can be altered without needing source code, and it's frigging cool how you can "localize code" without needing the source.
Anyway, I used it for personal purposes with GerryIcq back when ICQ for the mac had been at version 1.72 for a whole year or so [this will be in my
1) It is very tedious! Those programs are very small indeed, around 1MB each. System 7 and System 8 programs dont rely as much on system libraries (*cough*,CarbonLib,*die*) and thus the process isn't intimidating systemwise. However, you get to face hundreds of small lines, requiring several mouseclicks and tabbing through modifiable textfields. Definitely NOT for single members or ppl needing a vacation.
2) I screwed up text a lot, because of wrong key presses. This is ResEdit's fault mostly, but the relevancy is that you may get the wrong translated text into the wrong dialog without realizing it till you test-run a few times. So be careful.
Well, it's late, but I like this topic because I love windows, but it never gave me the oportunity to edit code without dissasembling it first. However, I am speaking more about pet projects where you might wanna contribute to the program creator. Again, more in my journal before next week --I am sleepy now.
"Wireless : LAN
first: must have: freedict.com translator program for windows.
OK, upon reading my parent post, I apologize. It's very incoherent and ideas were abandoned or left hanging.
1- the mac filesystem depends on two forks, but only one is used for pc compatibility. I had problems getting schoolwork home *because* macs files dont need extensions while my pc gasped as I had to append them and change filenames. [MacOS 7 to-or-from windows 95 days sucked in both systems]
2- the system libraries comment... no, i meant my test pgms were small. the libraries reference is about having external code called and thus possible external dialogs and weird outofrange untranslatable message boxes.
3- i love freeware, but by the time i got my mind set on trying to translate, someone already had translated the code and helped the creator. good for me, i guess. but seriously, many mac ppl feel comfortable about translations done to THEIR code because their SOURCE isn't leaked in the process. so they dont feel the threat of plagiarized utilities.
4- i feel good about Opera and some pgms that nowadays come with files containing languages. simple, one program file, different language files. it makes a compact and good-to-change setup. kudos. i love using alterante versions of windows and seeing that the menus arent in english. i feel like i got more out of my (free) downloads.
"Wireless : LAN
The Sami languages can be described as belonging to one of three groups, east, north, and south, each with a different set of letters, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. However, there are between 11 and 19 subgroups, depending on who you ask. South Sami can get by with ISO Latin-1. North Sami uses ISO Latin-1 plus 7 glyphs from central Europe. East Sami used to use a set similar to North, but during the Soviet era acquired Cyrillic.
So skolelinux is going to beat a lot of the internationalization issues with a conveniently small testbed.
Where did you get that info? China has more English speakers than India? I find that hard to believe.
Lasers Controlled Games!
In the UK, we have a similar issues with Welsh Gaelic. Nobody speaks it in reality but a few read & write it. All public documents must be translated at the taxpayers expense, Interestingly by the very same people that demand equal access to those documents in the first place.
I will buy MSOffice when it supports Limburgs and Fries. :-)
Which, will never happen
This is incorrect. Educated people spoke danish. Norwegian wasn't there to begin with, and was also
created, but in a much more conservative approach, keeping a lot of the danish simply norwegifying(!) some of the sounds.
A witty
I hates M$Word
...
...
...
...
OpenOffice is growing in the world
OpenOffice is open source that is eating popularity
OpenOffice has a nice future
OpenOffice is waiting to be a standard editor and their documents to be officials
http://www.openoffice.org/
Note: the big excuse from M$ is that they hate Open Source.
JCPM (copyright)
The net is like a vast sea of lutefisk with tiny dinosaur brains embedded
in it here and there. Any given spoonful will likely have an IQ of 1, but
occasional spoonfuls may have an IQ more than six times that!
-- James 'Kibo' Parry
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