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."

Comments

Kind of makes sense...

[Raetsel]

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...)

Is that so simple?

[jsse]

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. :(

Re:String tables.

[The Bungi]

I'm certan microsoft uses this method with their software.

Yes, but they place the resources (strings, icons, bitmaps, etc.) in a "satellite DLL" that is loaded depending on the system's codepage and locale identifier. If you look at an installation of, say, Office or MSDN you'll see subdirectories with the LCIDs (1033, 1054, etc.) and DLLs inside them. Each of them corresponds to a different locale.

Of course it gets complicated with the LANGID, SUBLANGID, whether or not the IME is enabled (W2K and XP) and so on. But that's the technique.

Most Scandavians already speak good English

[Ryu2]

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.