tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Dec 20 23:26:36 2003

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Please start GNOME/KDE translation project for Klingon (Klingon Computing)

David A. Wheeler ([email protected]) 

I'd love to see someone start a GNOME (and KDE) translation project
for Klingon.

The Linux kernel folks built some support in for Klingon many years ago.
The GNOME folks have been apparantly expecting some such
effort to start up, and seem to believe they're ready for it
(see Owen Taylor's comments at:
http://beast.gtk.org/mirror/gnome-news/946276088.html
Owen Taylor heads up GTK+, the key infrastructure of GNOME.)

GNOME and KDE are in general open to supporting other languages.
For example, Alan Cox (a key Linux kernel developer) recently discussed
how Welsh support was being added to GNOME:
http://www.itwales.com/cgi/showsite/showpage.cgi?998973

Back in 2000 there was discussion among the GNOME
folks.  Here's a direct quote:
"If a person thinks 
that it really sucks that GNOME isn't availiable in Klingon, he goes to 
the gnome.org pages, reads about the GNOME translation project, and 
reads the instruction about how to create a Klingon translation team and 
provide Klingon translations. Eventually, he will have company by others 
who also thinks the same about Klingon and want to help."  This is from:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-web-list/2000-November/msg00331.html

Here are GNOME's statistics for support of various languages:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/
Still no Klingon, because no one has decided to lead it (yet).

I notice that back in 2001 there was some discussion about
this, e.g.:
/tlhIngan-Hol/2001/July/msg00195.html

I have more contact with the GNOME folks, but I agree with earlier
messages that a great deal of the translation effort can be shared with KDE
(many key phrases like "File", "New", "Open File", etc. occur in both environments).
Even a small effort could quickly handle the most common phrases.
I suspect once a small set was created,
others would join and make it grow.  Especially if it was pointed to by
the KLI, the Klingon FAQ, etc.  And heck, even a small one would
make great eye-candy :-).

As the Klingon FAQ notes, there are also semi-official Unicode positions
for real Klingon characters, using them would make it easy to have the
"real" characters displayed.  See the FAQ for how to generate those;
it should be easy to let people enter the ASCII transliteration, and then
store/display the "real" characters.

Obviously there's the problem that some words may not have known translations,
but existing words may be assigned additional meanings (as has happened
in English).  Perhaps Dr. Okrand can even be talked into helping.
And whoever heads up the effort could always post to lists like this
"How should 'File' be translated?" etc if all else fails, in the hopes that many
minds might find solutions to the occasional sticky problem.

Anyway, I think it'd be fun to see.  I'm hoping to encourage someone
to actually give it a try.

--- David A. Wheeler <[email protected]>

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