How much work is a translation/localization of an entire new language?

[Carsten Agger]

Hi Gunnar!


On 5/3/23 23:35, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:

> There should not be such a thing as translating Ubuntu only. Ubuntu 
> consists of FOSS from a lot of sources, and the most reasonable 
> approach for translators is to translate FOSS into language X, rather 
> than only a specific Linux distro.
>
> [...]
> With that said, and to still give you a hint about the volume for 
> Ubuntu specifically, let's look at this page:
>
> https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/
>
> (click the "View all languages" link to get an overview)
>
> That page indicates 350,000+ translatable strings. But as Ask Hjorth 
> Larsen pointed out, you probably want to prioritize and focus on the 
> most visible strings for desktop users. OTOH, there are for instance 
> Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice which are installed by default 
> while their translations are not present in the Launchpad translation 
> interface, but handled elsewhere.
>
> I would say that establishing a new language in the world of FOSS is 
> quite a big undertaking, whether the work is done by volunteers or 
> professional translators.
>

Thanks a lot, those are important considerations! And yes, it would seem 
to be a bit of a task, not least because of the number of upstream 
projects with different translation frameworks.

Even though a limited subset (Firefox, LibreOffice, GNOME) would seem to 
go a long way.

Best,
Carsten