Localisation gone wild

l10n
#21

> We can always switch to NSIS which is truly open source.
>
> Yaron Shahrabani

Well, I'd recommend Unicode NSIS instead of traditional NSIS.

Unicode NSIS
http://www.scratchpaper.com/

AbiWord switched to Unicode NSIS to allow for a greater range of
language representations.

It might be necessary to host a few additional PO files (then convert
them to properly formatted nlf and nsh files for upstreaming) if your
language is not already complete in Unicode NSIS. I would be happy to
share the POT files I created manually for that purpose, which I host
only for languages where they are needed. It is not a lot of strings,
you've already got many of them complete as your installer appears to
be derived from NSIS.

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/AbiWord/

Wow Chris! your Pootle instance is too slow, would you consider updating
the system?
I was thinking about helping the Hebrew translation but it would take
forever on a sluggish system...

Kind regards,
Yaron Shahrabani.

#22

There's of course also the scenario of a locale you cannot select on any
OS but which has a LO localisation. Like Oromo, Kashmiri or Bodo which I
cannot find in the locales on offer in Windows 7 but which have LO
localizations.

It's a more general situation than the people here are considerating; non
only for languages that unfortunately have not a localizated OS but also in
sociocultural environnement (educational centers, administrative or
corporative infraestructure, low educated generations...) is common you
have a pc with a OS in a regional dominant language installed (spanish in
Spain or latinoamerican countries, for example) but you want install LO in
galician, catalan, aragonese, asturian, euskara, quechua, ....

Sometimes you haven't privileges for personalize the OS system (public
employe, student...) or you don't want go so deeply because you are not a
"expert".

Over WS, our 90% of total users? if the common user follows the standard
wizard (without realize the custom settings) he only will install de
spanish UI.

It's contraintuitive. It's a problem for users not well trained, and it's a
frustating barrier for native lang contributors because the localizated LO
is more dificult for our users.

For WS all language options must be equally accesible. The OS language not
implies you don't want other languages in your applications.

+1 For a independent setup installer

#23

Yeah, sorry about that. I've been looking for some sysadmin help to
upgrade our instance both in terms of Pootle version and into a VM on
new hardware we've put in place recently. Off-line work is welcomed.

cjl
cjl

#24

Hi,

Sometimes you haven't privileges for personalize the OS system (public
employe, student...) or you don't want go so deeply because you are not a
"expert".

Is it possible that a user does not have the privilige to change
Regional Options, but has the privilege to install software? Strange.

Over WS, our 90% of total users? if the common user follows the standard
wizard (without realize the custom settings) he only will install de
spanish UI.

Setup Type is the second screen of installer. In description of Custom
Install, we have the text: "here you can select additional user
interface languages".

+1 For a independent setup installer

OK, but please design it carefully. For example, I tried Abiword
install today on my English Windows 7. I selected Czech language.
Installer was in Czech, fine. Then I started Abiword. It had English
user interface, not Czech. It is not what we want, is it?

Best regards,
Andras

#25

Our build system produces (a very complicated) MSI package, not NSIS.
I think nobody volunteers to rewrite it for NSIS. MSI has the
advantage over NSIS, that it is the native installer format on
Windows, and makes enterprise deployments easy. We used to have an
NSIS wrapper on the top of MSI and we got rid of it, because every
extra layer adds complexity, increases install time and requires more
disk space.

Best regards,
Andras

#26

In a modern world, I think it might even be the time to do away with the locale-language connection. Even the locale data regulation span might be reduced somewhat.

More, with the major culture-data-employing entities (CLDR, Google, what-have-you) all having their outlooks competitively grown by crowdsource, it's becoming progressively more inconvenient to rely on the traditional locale-based ways to do things.

E.g., personally, I'm not thrilled when google constantly tries to force some off-beat -- what's worse, unmodifiable -- version of Belarusian on me if I'm accessing it from geographical location in Belarus.

Topic-wise, it's not always convenient to have locale dictating some of the choices in OOO components -- what is to be gained these days from the locale's default currency (eh?) field or from locale's language field? Or one might want to prepare a paper for a journal founded on quite a different conventions for what a thousand separator is.

To conclude, it's seems reasonable to expect of a person installing to know one language of choice and so to offer the choice of installation process language. It seems reasonable to expect the language of UI and help also to be a subject of preference. And that's that, really. No second-guessing anything else, please?

This reminds me a bit of Android actually. I use
an app called custom locale to get around the
frustrating force-locale issue in order to force
various apps to show up in Gaelic but that
aside, it has a bizarre impact on the weather
app. It cause the app to fluctuare between
English and Gaelic city/town names. Some days I
get "Glasgow", some days I get "Glaschu" - even
though AFAIK the app hasn't been localized (just
the standard weather app that comes with my

...

#27

2013.03.11. 0:23 keltezéssel, Christian Lohmaier írta:

Hi Jelle, *,

[...]
and probably the odd 10% of all world population that can consider
themselves immigrants.

I disagree here. Why do they use a OS they cannot understand in the
first place? Either they already own a computer, then they should just
keep using that, or they have to buy one, but then they could just buy
a version in the language they understand.

And if you're there to work - how are you supposed to actually do
work, when you cannot understand the OS - and why let people install
you software there? So to me it still is a rare corner-case.

In Romania, the 1st localized windows was windows XP (and not natively localized, peoples need to install additonal language pack), and the windows xp localization is not very good (40%+ of romanina people use windows xp), the peoples don't understand, but learned the english expressions, and usually don't like the localized version, because don't understand the localized expressions (he understand the words, but can't connect the word with what is meaning). For this reason 50%+ of windows instalation is in english, and usually this peoples don't change your regional settings to romanian (this enough to switch the LO installer to romanian).

And another reason why people are using English Windows, even though it does not speak English, is that in romania 50%+ (in private area 70%+) of windows installations is illegal (illegal windows = english windows), and in this case peoples disable windows update, the download source of the localizations.

#28

Hi :) 
If you happen to live in a country where the dominant language is not your own then when you buy a computer which language is the LibreOffice installer in? 
1.  your own language 
2.  the dominant language of the country 
3.  English (US)
What about countries that have many different languages; some by region, some by class or religion, some by origin.

Obviously you can change it or add different languages but you have to understand the default language enough to be able to navigate your way around.  Apparently in Japan it's not possible to buy a machine with Japanese on it.  Keyboards have English as the main letter on each key and it is not even easy to find one that has Japanese characters even as 2nd place.  There are many other reasons why a person's computer might be talking a language that is not easy for them to understand.  Here is how the Ubuntu installer gets around the problem.  Their installer lists languages with each name written in the language it relates to ...

My machine's "Regional settings" are set to English so i get this at first ... 
<http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/file/n4042985/Ubuntu-English-v2.png>
However if i use the keyboard arrows to move down a bit then i get to Greek like this ... 
<http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/file/n4042985/Ubuntu-ελληνικά-v2.png>
a side-note is that the installer's dialogue box's size increases to accommodate the increase in paragraph size.

Of course it's a bit annoying for me because i can't read Japanese or Greek.  So if i want to install in Japanese for one of my colleagues then i don't know the difference between Chinese, Korean, Japanese or other ones that look similar to me  (errr, ok i cheated and used Google translate).  I think the LibreOffice installer  might be even better if it could have 2 columns with the 2nd column being a listing in whichever language happens to be selected at the time.  For example in the 1st screen-shot the columns would show the 3 languages i'm using as examples as 
English      English 
ελληνικά   Greek 
日本人         Japanese

but in the 2nd screen-shot they would appear as 
English      Αγγλικά 
ελληνικά   ελληνικά 
日本人        ιαπωνικά

I just wondered if that is the sort of thing people would like to see?  Would it be too difficult for the dev's to manage?   
Regards from 
Tom :slight_smile: