Localisation of Ubuntu in Piedmontese language

[Milo Casagrande]

Hi all,

I'll try (and hope) to answer to all the emails with this one...

Il giorno dom, 19/10/2008 alle 13.48 +0100, Matthew East ha scritto:
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Bèrto ëd Sèra <berto.d.sera at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > FYI, piedmontese is taught in public schools and recognized by the Regional
> > Laws. It is a growing part of the public education scheme and almost 5.000
> > children went through the courses last year, but we obviously need tools for
> > that. There are plans to distribute free hardware to the kids to help them
> > in their learning process and we need a localised OS for that. This is what
> > I'm working for.

This sounds like an interesting project and noble one too.

From previous Sabine email, it looks like you've already translated some
parts of Ubuntu in Piemontese, at least I suppose you already created a
team in Launchpad. 

For *really* translating Ubuntu you will also need to contact the
Translations team to set up the final bits: like ISO code, plural forms,
etc., then they can grant you access and you can start translating
Ubuntu with Launchap. With this in mind, I also suggest you to contact
other translations team like GNOME, Debian, KDE and the Translation
Project, register your team and the ISO code for Piemontese. If you
really want to translate a desktop environment like GNOME, you should do
that under the GNOME translation team umbrella. Other pieces of the
distribution fall into different teams.

You can still use Launchpad if you want to, and probably it's easier for
you right now to have a central place where you can work, but you should
pass all your translations to GNOME and the other projects for other
people and distributions to benefit from them. Launchpad can't handle
this information exchange for you and some of the translations would be
"lost" in Launchpad.

> > Yet, if this has to become a "political" issue, I'd rather opt out of Ubuntu
> > immediately. I'm honestly quite tired to be assigned a political view I do
> > not have
> 
> First of all, my email was an expression of my own opinion, rather
> than of the Ubuntu project. There isn't any policy about dialects that
> I'm aware of in the project. Secondly, note that I didn't assign any
> political view to you in my email... And my email itself wasn't
> political in nature. I was asking the question of whether it would be
> beneficial to anyone to have Ubuntu localised in a dialect, in
> circumstances where the focus of Italian education is on the national
> language.
> 
> There are difficult questions of where to draw the line when it comes
> to languages and dialects. Official recognition, education and whether
> the language has any general written culture are all relevant
> considerations.

From this POV I agree with Matt. I'm Italian, but I don't personally see
the beneficial of translating into Italian dialects/minor languages,
mainly for practical reason than philosophical or historic ones... We
can argue for ages about these POVs, but we would solve nothing.

Said that, I see you would like to get a 25% of the distro localized in
3-4 months... that's a though task! I don't know how many people are
involved or if they would be involved 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, but 25%
of only the GNOME Dekstop is: "a lot of strings"... I think you would
also like to translate OpenOffice, and that's huge (for OO you should
contact the PLIO (Progetto Linguistico Italiano OpenOffice) and ask them
how to handle all the translation project).

I don't know how concrete is your translation team, but I would start by
writing guidelines and glossaries, then create a list of the most common
pieces of software of the GNOME Desktop and prioritize them based on
importance in the environment, common use or most used application. But,
as I said, you have first to define your team in Launchpad and set up
all the necessary infrastructure (locale, ISO code...) before you can
start using your own translations.

-- 
Milo Casagrande <milo_casagrande at yahoo.it>
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