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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."
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
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.
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.
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.