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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
it get worse. there's nowhere near that number of people who think this is a good idea. most civilized norwegians (born and raised in a city in the south of the country) would prefere never to hear of nynorsk ever again. this would be a guesstimated 80% of the norwegian population.
now, i'm all for leting people speak whatever language they want, but these nynorsk language-nazies even force us to learn it in school.
DRA TIL HELVETE, SPRAAKNAZIER!
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
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.
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...
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Yeah. Except that the "professional translating company" has no clue at all about the context in which the strings will be used... and that guarantees some really funny results. At least that's my experience.
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.
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
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.
i'd go with grand parent. that way you keep the feminists of your back :-)
i was born in the sixties, so i'm thinking "kid" is kind of stretching it a little...
but i think you missed my point. i support everyones right to speak whatever language they want. what pisses me of is that kids in school are forced to waste their time learning this useless(1) language instead of of spending their time on something relevant.
btw: it was never my intention to call anyone nynorsk-nazi, but rather language-nazi. i'm sure they are just as bad on both "sides" of the fence.
(1): nynorsk is useless for most norwegian to study as we already understand it quite well, and the speakers of nynorsk understand us. norwegian kids, whos everyday language is bookmaal, doesn't learn nynorsk to be able to communicate with their countrymen, but for some fucked-up political reason.
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
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.
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/
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.
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.
Oops, I should have written: a fraction of the 4.5 million Norwegians
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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?
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...
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.
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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?
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.
I'm reminded of the situation with certain uses of French being *required* in essentially English-speaking Canada, and the "language Nazism" (NOT an exaggerated description in this case) that takes place in Quebec. It has no real benefit, but does drive a divisive wedge into society that otherwise would not have naturally existed.
:(
... except for a few Swedes they don't admit are related. :)
Political statements of national identity always seem to devolve into enforcement of something that is functionally useless or even detrimental to the society as a whole
BTW, a funny -- My mom's family is all Norwegian (from Trondheim area originally)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yes, that's correct. Because Microsoft couldn't design a working translation scheme, you have to wait for them getting their act together until you can apply your service pack - which can take over a week.
That's probably why Microsoft doesn't want to do so many translations. If you have a good translation system, it's easy. Even one person or a small group of people can easily translate big software packages: look here but when you have to maintain 10 year old code which was written by people who either left or were assigned to other tasks or management, you have to translate every service pack and fixpack all over.
I wonder how much this Nynorsk translation will cost Microsoft ;-)
There is another explanation. Localizable resources are separated from the code, but they are compiled into the same binary.
So you mean to tell me that Microsoft in all it's glory needs more than a WEEK to recompile a servicepack?
Oh, phu-lease.
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.
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Or someone with a bad command of the language can do a bad translation of it and no one catches him on it until latter. I use OSS but at least with commercial software MS is hiring professional translators. I'm not saying there aren't good or even pro translators out there translating for OSS, but that certainly doesn't mean all the translations are perfect, especially not because the software is OSS. Imagine if the OO.o translation had the norwegian equivalent of "all your base are belong to us" for example.
Why not fork?
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
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.
Dra Til Helvete Spraaknazier!
/.ers don't speak norsk.
Translation: Go to Hell Language-Nazi!
Don't forget most
--Joey
that was pretty much the gist of the rest of the comment, wasn't it? and by the way, that's language-nazies.
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
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
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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.
The reason why it is not considered part of Scandinavian is two fold:
1. The language is not Nordic
2. Finns have an eastern european background.
Which is why Iceland is sometimes part of Scandinavia despite it being far removed...
--Joey
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
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.