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

That's why having resources in files is helpful

[swissmonkey]

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.

Re:That's why having resources in files is helpful

[bokmann]

I manage a project for the U.S. State Department that is translated into about a dozen languages.

It is not as simple as just translating Strings, but that is probably the biggest part of it. You also have to be aware of Date formats in different locales, customs for displaying large numbers (some countries separate with commas, spaces, or even periods), currency display, and if your application does something with it, Units of Measure (such as feet, meters, miles, etc).

There are even cultural sensitivities for icons - Think how often you see an icon in an application that is based on something like a Street Sign (like a stop sign). All of these have to be localizable.

ISO has standards on all of these things, and it is hard to go wrong by sticking with standards.

Java has beena big win for us here. Besides being able to keep all the strings out of the application and in Resource Bundles, it is aware of a bunch of 'locales', and when you set the locale, classes like Date just Do The Right Thing. The MessageFormatter also helps when you want to build sentences by suppliying words in the middle, but sentence structure changes from language to language.

There are actually TWO different skills here:

The first is called Internationalization (oftern abreviated I18n), and it involves all the skills necessary to write an application so it is neutral to cultural biases. All Strings in resource files, all messages composed with MessageFormetters, all Icons loaded from the filesystem and with a naming convention so they can be substituted in the future, and managing the layout of windows so that they 'grow' nicely when a 4 letter word gets subsituted by a 4 word phrase in another language.

The second is called 'Localization', (L10N) and needs to occur for each Locale you are planning to customize your application for. This is best done by native language speakers who ALSO speak the language of the developers or domain experts. If the Internationalization was done right, then it just involves editing 'configuration', and no real coding.

String tables.

[autopr0n]

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.

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.

nynorsk is irritating..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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...)

Re:Boycotts work

[snillfisk]

While the point about buying from whomever decide to provide the software in their language is quite valid, there really isn't much software that support nynorsk - and even less that support the third language used in some northern parts of Norway, 'Lappish' or 'Samisk'. The main point here being that schools wasn't even going to *CONSIDER* buying MS software unless they got support for 'Nynorsk' in the software packages, and while it still remains up to each and single school to choose what software they want to use, it will still make sure that the 'Nynorsk' language gets preserved in those cases where they DO select to use Microsoft software. As the article also states, this may give hope to other "small" languages a bit more acceptance and usage, giving Catalan as an example.

The trend in Norway is however quite the opposite, more and more schools are realizing that there is several good alternatives, Linux being one of them. Norway is (afaik) one of the few countries that has their own Linux distro just for schools - which support regular Norwegian, Nynorsk ("New Norwegian") and Samisk (Lappish). read more about it (in norwegian! :-)) here .. It's gotten support from the department of education and science and all the work are done on a volountarily basis. It's quite amazing to see that several schools now are switching and several others are considering the same.

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. :(

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.

Re:Most Scandavians already speak good English

[KjetilK]

Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English

Thanks! :-) (I'm Norwegian)

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.

Actually, this is bigger or smaller than that, depending on how you think about it.

Norway has two official written languages "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk" (nb and nn in iso639 (?)). I would say that neither of them are spoken, we have an incredible richness of dialects here. A huge majority of the population writes nb. Office, and the rest of Windows has always been translated and been available for nb upon launch.

nn and nb are almost identical. nb was highly influenced by Danish, as Norway was pretty much a colony under Denmark for a few hundred years, and the official language among the elites where Danish. So, I guy named Ivar Aasen collected dialects from certain parts of the country which he believed was less influenced by Danish and constructed a written language from it. This became the foundation for nn. The controversy over these two languages where high, I can tell you, but currently there are laws that keeps nn alive. For example, all books in public schools must be available in both languages, if you write a letter to a public office, that public office must respond in the same language.

That may sound reasonable, but these two languages are so similar, that while high-school-students bitch and moan about how difficult the other is to learn, nobody with a minimum of intelligence can honestly claim to have difficulties reading the other.

But MS have never found it commercially viable to translate Office to nn. That is quite understandable; my father is an author, and one of his books where translated to nn, that costed NOK 100000 (that's about $16000), and it sold two copies... (he wasn't the one who lost all this money, it was a public office to had to obey this law).

So while I think that this law causes huge wastes of money, we free software geeks have been very happy about the events so far. We can point out that KDE and Mozilla have been available for nn before nb, I believe, because there are many good developers who write nn. So, it has given us a lot of good publicity, and some regional governmental offices has funded translation of OpenOffice to nn, and hopefully, the translation will be available before MS Office, again a big win.

I think it is a part of the story that MS was becoming quite scared of the prospect of OO eating quite a lot of marketshare because of this. They have to keep a tight grip on the market, because if they loose some of the market to OO, and reports are positive, they will loose a lot more.

Also, the figures quoted by MS for the cost of translating Office to nn has been huge. This has also given us some good publicity, because the funds we require to translate free software is far from that big. For one thing, this has illustrated that it is free as in speech that is the important aspect of free software, but experience has shown that usually, free as in speech software is cheeper to work with. Once people get experience with alternatives, things are sliding our way.

To avoid flames by the Norwegian nn crowd, let me say that I have nothing against nn myself. I don't write it, but I appreciate reading it and I acknowledge that much of the finest Norwegian literature is written in nn. I'm opposed to laws that require people to write either of the languages however, but I think that if you write a letter in the language of your choice, you are entitled to expect the receiver to be so well educated that he can understand it.

translations & OS

[pamri]

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." Yes to all. Translating OS s/w is no big deal & doesn't require any programming skills. Kde & Gnome have great documentation, resources all neatly organised. So, I will let them do the talking:

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.

31337...

[suss]

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)

UNICODE and string tables

[videodriverguy]

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.

The problems I encountered with a translation

[LeftOfCentre]

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.

Brief Background on Nynorsk...

[Joey7F]

IANAN (I am not a 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 ;)) 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.

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