[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    The importance of translations
From:       Sebastià Pla i Sanz <sastia () retemail ! es>
Date:       2000-09-27 20:53:08
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi all,

This story has happened to me this morning. I've seen a guy in my company (I 
work for a software & services firm in Barcelona) using KDE 1.2 in catalan.

me: Hey !, you are using KDE, what do you think of this?
him: Great !! I like it much more than Gnome...
me: Do you know that I've done most of the catalan translation?
him: Really? It's very well done !

I nearly broke into tears ;-). I'm sharing this story with you just to 
reassure everybody of the importance of what we are doing. Without the coders 
we would have nothing to translate. But one of the keys of KDE's success is the 
attention paid to i18n. All the work by Coolo, Juraj, Thomas and the rest, the 
i18n web site, the CVS, the scripts, the daily snapshots, KBabel and 
KTranslator, all this infrastructure is of a quality that surpasses that of a 
lot of commercial projects. This, and our work makes possible that a lot of 
people that doesn't know English can benefit from a quality desktop.

Being a programmer myself, when I joined the KDE effort, I would have 
preferred to help the coding bunch, but I thought that my work would be more 
necessary in the translation to catalan. (If not you, then nobody, said 
Stephan). I think this is still the case and try to remember it when revising 
for the umptenth time the same file, just to discover that the messages that I 
translated three days ago are now obsolete...

I know that Thomas and Stephan are trying to convey our problems to the 
developers. If just we knew wich files are more likely to change, we would be 
able not to waste so much effort and not to discourage the newcomers.

Well, I apologise for such a long message. I just thought that sharing my 
feelings would be useful in those days of KSpread fuzzyness...

Sebastià.
-- 
Encara quedem valencians que no volem deixar d'ésser el poble que som,
que no volem cedir a la dissolució ni a la indiferència.
		   Joan Fuster. "Nosaltres, els valencians"

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]