[Kde-i18n-fa] some problems

[Arash Partow]

Hi,

> I live in a Turkish speaking country, and there, no one knows what is
> "computer" (except those who know English). People call it 'Bilgisayar',
> which means analytic machine.
actually it is the direct translation which is bilgi(information)
sayar(present
progressive of counter) so it makes information counter, which many turkish
people in computer science believe to be inadequate.

> How many people do you know that use the term
> "rayaneh" in farsi?
heaps..

> Same with French, and Arabic. I have been enough in Arabic countries, to
> realize that no word enters their language, without first being localized.
>
> I came to Iran a few weeks ago, and suddenly I was shocked by a fact.
Farsi
> speaking people are using too many English words in their day-to-day
> conversation. This is the first sign of a language in it's death row, when
a
> language isn't making new words, it's dead.

A friend and I are doing some research on developing a general soundex for
the
Persian language using the some of the same techniques used to develop the
english one. As a side exercise we decided to see how many common phonetic
structures could be found in English and Persian, to our surprise we saw
that
the two languages had sooooo many words that had common phonetic foundations
it is not funny, same goes for German and French and also Indian. place the
sound "p" in place of "f" in many of the words in Persian(not all) (a
disease
brought about by the Arabic language) i.e.: farsi -> parsi take away any
words
that start with the sound "mu" and there is a high probability that the
group
of words remaining will sound very similar to a word in the any of those
other
languages. Persian was once a fully indo-European language.

Also if you are thinking english is developing new words from scratch that
is
false too, a lot of scientific terminology is regurgitated Latin with modern
suffixes and prefixes, basically whatever sounds GOOD. MS pays companies
millions of dollars each year to come up with new terminology and acronyms
that sound great for all the new products they make.

In the end people will use whatever sounds GOOD to them, whatever will get
the
message across quicker, an example is how the Israelis are changing
technical
terminology in Hebrew so that it sounds more like english terms so that
academics find it easier to obtain information and knowledge with very
limited
english but also to be able to convey ideas and thoughts with the same
amount
of english. Its all about efficiency.

BTW I dont see Turkish people calling a server a servis veren or
servisligici
they call it a server they even call a keyboard a klaviye which is French (i
think or some other european dialect), one exception they call an operating
system isletme sistemi which directly translates back word by word.

A few months or so ago, I asked for people to give back their translations
to
a list of technical words, I only got 1 reply from someone who was not even
doing translations, so from the 6-7 people who are ACTUALLY doing the
translation nothing came of them. This means only 1 thing, they can't be
stuffed debating their way of thinking until they have made an effort and
checked something into the repository hence making another mountain to
climb in order to make them change their mistakes once the initial debate
over whether or not they made a mistake in the first place has been
completed.

Put it this way, what will happen with FarsiKDE is going to be the same as
what happened with the BSDs, people are not going to be happy with the
way the project is going and will begin branching the CVS tree, at that
point
you loose all control over the project and also defragment efforts of
people.
The reason why I asked for people to give their list of words was cause I
had
installed FKDE and saw the translations with friends in fact I was
installing
it with some Iranian guys we were laughing our heads off at some of the
translations, they were so bad and so funny, it was like the person
translating was scratching their left ear with their right hand but going
over
the top of their head. It was that out-of-wack. But at the time I didn't
want
to say anything cause I wasn't actively contributing and I thought people in
charge were going to organize the level and standards of translations a bit
better.

All the symptoms of BSD are there its just a matter of time for the awe of
Persian KDE to wear off people's faces, then people will begin to realize
what
a mediocre attempt this was, they may then begin branching. One of the
biggest
problems facing OSS companies trying to internationalize their products is
the
quality of translations and back-translations. Something I think KDE hoped
would be self governing when it came to them.

Anywayz that was my 2 cents.

Arash


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