Rosetta-Feedback - UDS Prague

[Timo Jyrinki]

2008/6/15 Neskie Manuel <neskiem at gmail.com>:
>  I would like to work with somone,
> interested on implementing features and writing/collecting
> documentation that would make this easier for other new translation
> teams.   This would be helpful for groups in North America, Papua New
> Guinea, South America, and other areas where people are starting
> fresh.

Since this is clearly something very close to Ubuntu philosophy in
general, I'd hope someone at Canonical could spare some time helping
in writing this kind of documentation together. But anyway since you
seem to have quite a lot of knowledge already, it would be great to
have at least something written down in page named eg. "Getting new
language up and running HOWTO" in Ubuntu wiki
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TranslatingUbuntu or other place. I don't
think there's a general guide anywhere that covers all of glibc locale
information adding, keyboards, fonts, Unicode CLDR information and
other stuff like that?

Some statistics about Sami languages that are spoken around here in
the Nordic countries, even though I don't speak any of them: out of
the 9 still existing Sami languages, only the biggest one (Northern
Sami, sme, 30000 speakers) has the mentioned basic things covered and
some KDE translations are actually in Ubuntu. Out of the rest, at
least Southern Sami (sma_NO, ca. 500 speakers), Lule Sami (smj_SE, ca.
1500 speakers), Skolt Sami (sms_FI, ca. 400 speakers) and Inari Sami
(smn_FI, ca. 300 speakers) could have IMO real possibilities of
translating Ubuntu. For example Skolt Sami and Inari Sami have quite
well preserved status here in Finland despite the low number of
speakers. Kildin Sami spoken in Russia has apparently no approved
language code even though it has ca. 650 speakers, because of
orthographical issues + lots of dialects.

One interesting topic is also how to decide the default country codes
for the locales to be used - it's relatively clear when the largest
proportion of speakers is in one country (like I chosed countries for
the mentioned other Sami languages), but there might be quite corner
cases. I think the default Northern Sami configuration had _NO
assumed, even though there are thousands of speakers in Sweden and
Finland, too.

-Timo