rosetta-users Digest, Vol 31, Issue 3

[Cai ZhongHan]

The reason why Chinese (by race) people in Singapore aren't active in open 
source translation is as follows:
1. Those who primarily/only speak Chinese are either technologically 
illiterate or are educated only in the use of Windows, thus don't contribute 
to open source.
2. The above people were educated in traditional Chinese script 
(繁体）
3. Those who are largely bilingual in Chinese and English are educated in 
simplified Chinese script (简体）
4. Simplified and traditional Chinese script are generally mutually 
unintelligible
5. Singaporeans who are bilingual in Chinese and English will use en_GB 
localisation, because they are used to English localisations for OS, due to 
the fact that Windows is only offered in English in Singapore
6. Thus these bilingual Singaporeans don't have the motivation to localise 
zh_SG

ZhongHan

>Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 02:13:27 +0800
>From: "Abel Cheung" <abelcheung at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: request to reduce splintering of language translations
>To: "Sridhar Dhanapalan" <sridhar at dhanapalan.com>
>Cc: rosetta-users at lists.ubuntu.com, Valient Gough <valient at gmail.com>
>Message-ID:
>	<df41a9470704021113x7bb4e608x41fadf89438d06de at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
>On 4/2/07, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at dhanapalan.com> wrote:
> > > The en_GB.po and en_CA.po are just cut & paste copies of the original 
>text,
> > > as far as I can tell.  The en_CA looks like a rush job since they even 
>cut
> > > and paste one source text into multiple entries in some places.  
>Perhaps
> > > they were looking to game the points/karma system you use.
> >
> > Like many other languages, English is not immune to dialecticism. In 
>many
> > cases, the variants are identical, but there are many, often subtle,
> > differences between them.
>
>I can't tell if translators in Rosetta are just playing games, but what 
>Sridhar
>said is definitely true. So far we can count en_US, en_GB, en_CA and en_AU
>as 4 'variants', with slight subtle differences between each other. When
>people in one country start to feel 'uncomfortable' with translation from 
>the
>other, they would always have the urge to split, or in their own words,
>'correct' it. When it happens just depend on the tolerance of people.
>
>The above quote for Chinese is actually an over-simplification. There 
>should
>be 4 major variants as well: zh_CN, zh_TW, zh_HK and zh_SG. But I'm not
>sure why I have never came across Chinese people in Singapore who's
>active in open source translation, so no zh_SG. I am splitting zh_HK from
>zh_TW exactly because I start to feel uncomfortable with zh_TW translation
>which doesn't fit the need for Hong Kong people. Different languages, but
>the same reasoning.
>
>Abel
>
>
> >
> > The en_GB team has been pushing for hierarchical translations, so that 
>for
> > example en_GB can be derived from C, and en_AU can be derived from 
>en_GB. For
> > the moment, though, we are left to implement everything manually. The
> > unfortunate side effect is that this results in a mountain of duplicate 
>work.
> >
> >
> > --
> >                         make install, not war
> >
> > --
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> > rosetta-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: 
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> > Learn more about Rosetta: https://launchpad.net/translations/+about
> >
> >
>
>
>--
>Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
>Key fingerprint: 671C C7AE EFB5 110C D6D1  41EE 4152 E1F1 C671 86FF
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>* GNOME Hong Kong - http://www.gnome.hk/
>* Opensource Application Knowledge Assoc. - http://oaka.org/
>* My own cave: http://me.abelcheung.org/
>

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