LL-L "Resources" 2003.10.24 (06) [E]

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From: Kenneth Rohde Christiansen <kenneth at gnu.org>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2003.10.24 (05) [E]

> Kenneth, it would be helpful if you let us know how much work would be
> involved if one took on a translation project.
>
> Good luck with your projects, and thanks again!

I don't know how much time it will take translating OpenOffice. We could
mail the Danish or the Dutch team. I haven't been that much involved in
OpenOffice yet - though I intent to.

I have been working on the GNOME project for the last 5 years I think.
The GNOME project is a free desktop project for Linux. I have been
involved with the GNOME translation project as well - and still am to
some extend.

I would expect the amount of work to be lesser than that of translation
GNOME. I know that 3 guys translated GNOME into Mongolian in a months
time; and our very own Mathieu have translated 1/3 of GNOME into
Limburgish within short time as well.

>>From my own experience the most time spend is in the beginning.

You run into a lot of words you don't really know how to translate - or
different translators translate the differently leading to
inconsistense.

Another problem is the length of the translated strings. When you
translate a "string" it has to have approx the same length or be smaller
than the original. If not, you might end up with buttons taking up half
of the screen.

You also have to agree on how to translate common used sentences, like
"Couldn't open file". In Danish this has been translated into:

"Kunne ikke åbne fil", "Åbning af fil mislykkedes". "Fejl ved åbning af
fil"... etc.

You need to agree on such things or you end up with a very bad,
inconsistens translation.

Here is a list of words used in translation by the Norwegian team:
http://i18n.skulelinux.no/nb/Fellesordl.eng-no.html - it is based on my
old list for Danish

When you have agreed on some of the tough words and have got to know the
translation tools, it is actually quite easy and you can translate a lot
in a few days - but the task is not to be underestimated! A programs
contains a lot of strings - and often more than you think: seldom shown
dialogs, error messages, configuration dialogs etc etc.


If people are wondering about the relation between OpenOffice and GNOME,
I will explain it shortly.

Sun decided to work on GNOME some years ago and before doing so they
bought the OpenOffice code (then called StarOffice) and released it
under an open source license. GNOME was without a good well working
office suite so we kind of adapted OpenOffice, and have since been doing
a lot to integrate OpenOffice and GNOME on the Linux/Unix platform:

Links:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/51C42D4C6818A846CC256DCD00128E0E?OpenDocument
http://www.ximian.com/products/desktop/

Open source software can be confusing to people who never heard about
it. Often so, because it might be possible to download the software for
free and at the same time to buy it if you need support and manuals.

Some of the companies involved in OpenOffice and GNOME are:
Red Hat, Sun, Novell/Ximian, SuSE.

If is possible to get OpenOffice, GNOME (requires Linux) from these
companies for free, but also to buy it.

OpenOffice and GNOME are produced by these companies AND by a lot of
voluntiers! The GNOME project probably has around 400 unpaid, active
developers and translators.

There is a lot of philosophy behind open source software - and there are
a lot of good documents on the net explaining it a lot better than I can
do.

Cheers,

--
Kenneth Christiansen <kenneth(@)gnu.org>
http://kenneth.phileon.nl

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