[Kde-i18n-fa] what to do,

[Aryan Ameri]

On Monday 19 May 2003 15:26, Abbas Izad wrote:

> >So, what  can I do now, check the previous
> >translations or do translation,
> >as I checked kde statistics we are behind of some
> >countries that I don't like that,
>
> I also visited the statistics before I started with my first
> package and felt that we are behind others but based on our
> coordinators we are not.

I explained this in my reply to Kaveh, but let me explain this a bit 
more. 

Languages such as German, Spanish, and French started their work, way 
back, I guess in 1996 before even KDE 1.0 was released. This is not 
extraordinary because most of KDE developers at that time were German 
and in general european (and maybe still this is true to some degree). 
At the time of KDE 1.0, KDE wasn't this powerfull feature-rich 
environment that we now have (you remember those days Abbas ?) 
Translating it wasn't that much a big job, it was only a couple 
thousand messages. 

KDE evolved gradually. And the translators of these languages also 
updated their work. It is not that difficult to keep with changes, the 
difficult part is to start, and translate new packages (the situation 
which we are currently in). So these days, entering a new language in 
KDE is not that easy. Because KDE has become so big, and just to start 
with it, you need to translate lots of strings. This is why, entering a 
new language these days is a Herculean task. Because a new language 
means translating tens of thousand of strings, just to start. And as 
you noted, the first translations are the most difficult ones. After 
you have translated a good deal, then it is more 'cut & paste' than 
translation.


furthermore European languages didn't have many of our problems, they 
didn't have the problem with fonts, they didn't have the problem with 
right to left writing (which is still sometimes painfull in KBabel). 
They didn't have to wait for Unicode to take off. We faced many of 
these challenges. It is not fair to compare our work with the work of 
those translators. 

European translators, started their work in 1996, what you now see in 
their statistics, is the work of nearly 7 years of continuous 
development. We on the other hand, couldn't start the translation 
process until KDE 3.0 was released, which was May 2002. We started the 
job a few months after that, and considering the time that we have 
worked on this thing, we have reached a good milestone. We should be 
proud of ourselves guys, we have done something important. When I look 
now, I see that countries with more population than Iran, like 
Pakistan, still have not even developed a XFree86 keyboard layout. 
There are considerably more Arabs that Iranians, and their computing 
community is much more active than ours, and still, our work is 
compareable to them. 

And last but not least, we should take into account that european 
translators have powerfull sponsors, the German government and SuSE are 
active members of the KDE, and they also participate in the translation 
process (in different ways). Mandrake makes sure that all of Gnome and 
KDE is translated to French. We OTOH have neither government nor 
corporate backing. And yet, we are producing the first Farsi computing 
environment after years. The last Farsi computing environments were DOS 
(which was translated by the force of a government agency which I do 
not remember it's name) and Windows 3.1 which was translated by 
Microsoft. 

We are setting standards in many regards. This is no easy task that we 
are doing. I hope one day, we get the recognition that we deserve.
Currently of course, that day doesn't seem to be near.

Cheers 
-- 
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Aryan Ameri