From: Jordi Mas (jmas@softcatala.org)
Date: Wed Jan 01 2003 - 12:14:21 EST
En/na ericzen ha escrit:
> More reasons to use GNOME!
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/31/2256213&mode=nested&tid=109
>
> Thank you and Happy New Year's to our translator, Karl, and our applier, Pierre!
>
> Je suis l'morse,
> Eric Zen
>
> (I wonder what Nynorsk would be for that line)
Here in Catalonia Microsoft had lots of pressure from the Goverment to
translate Windows and Office into Catalan, as its mention in the article.
Nothing from our friends at Microsoft comes for free. The Catalan goverment
has sign a very large contract with Microsoft to do all the e-goverment stuff
using Microsoft software. We are talking about hundred of millions of euros.
As a part of the deal, Microsoft will create translated versions of Office and
Windows products into Catalan.
Now the funny part. Microsoft has a technology called LIP (Language Interface
Pack). This is basically a group of resource-only DLL that installed over
Windows or Office 11 allow a translation of the product. They already have
done for Windows XP in Catalan (see http://www.softcatala.org/prog129.htm).
The bad news is that the translations are partial, you cannot localise the
on-line documentation, and it not a full-installable version. It's just a
patch will resource only DLL. Better than nothing, but languages like French
or German have full installable versions.
Basically, the Microsoft strategy for minor languages is a patch tecnology,
and they will provide these tools to local goverments. In LongHorn, they said
that they will have a XML based l18n system, like Abiword does for years now.
--Jordi Mas http://www.softcatala.org
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