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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    article: Dutch KDE team 'strikes back'
From:       Rinse de Vries <rinse () kde ! nl>
Date:       2000-10-25 21:37:55
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Hi,
Monday night, we have sent our version of the press release to the main
press and computer magazines in The Netherlands and Belgium.
We've  got quite some feedback from those magazines, incl the magazine C'T
(which is the Dutch version of the German magazine C'T )
C'T mentioned to us that pr of Linux in general is very bad, magazines
have to search sites like www.linuxtoday.com and dot.kde.org to look for
news about Linux which they can use to publish in their magazines or
Internet pages.
They also noticed a discussion in our own mailing list
(www.egroups.com/kde-nl/ -- ) about the fact
that Dutch magazines always use the English application and web pages in
their articles instead of the Dutch versions.
It appeared that most magazines are unaware of the localization of KDE,
due to the lack of local pr.
I informed them about the fact that this is gonna change, in the future,
KDE will offer the press releases to the translation teams before they are
published. 

Our chat resulted in a small article on the web site of c't: 
http://www.fnl.nl/newsticker/data/2000.10/2000.10.25-tub-001.htm

This is a rough translation of the article:
==========
Dutch KDE team 'Strikes Back'

The Empire, the Gnome Desktop, seems to attract all the attention of the press en it \
looks like they are pushing the technical very competent KDE-team out of our memory. \
But the Dutch KDE fans [www.kde.nl] succeeded in releasing a Dutch version of KDE2, \
after failing to release a complete Dutch version of KDE1.

By bringing new life into the project new volunteers came to aid and new
translation standards were set in www.kde.nl/nl/translation-howto/ This
resulted in the first quarter of this year in a translation of KDE2. KDE2
is currently 100% translated, a huge job considering that only 4
translators completed the majority of the task -- translating about 22,000
strings.

After the PR success of Gnome, the international KDE realizes that good public \
relations contribute to the fame of the product. This will result in a better \
cooperation between the writers of the press releases and the translation teams. In \
the future, translations are first offered to the translation teams before they are \
released to the public

===========================

Oh, by the way, I never mentioned Gnome ;-)
But I think there is a good lesson to take.
On dot.kde.org there was a discussion about the pr of KDE.
I didn't follow the complete discussion, but I noticed that most reply's
were about that we should do things the GNOME-way.
I think we should approach things differently: translate the press
releases to all languages which KDE uses (if the teams haven enough time
and people to do so) and not only publish the press releases on our own
web sites, but also sent it to as many local computer magazines and press
as possible. 
Then people will notice KDE and also their local version of it.


Rinse de Vries


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