Re: Kurdish - we give it a start

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Erdal,

I welcome you as well to GNOME Translation People (or Project, if
you're overly precise :), and wish you a long and fun stay ;)


Btw, we have 

   Kurdish    Abdullah Ulas     http://gnome-kurdi.sourceforge.net/ 

entry on http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/teams.html

I am CCing Abdullah so you get in touch with him (from GTP POV, we
usually recommend that you try contacting current language coordinator
first).

We need to have a single point of contact (so we avoid any disputes)
for any team, and since Abdullah was the first one to step up, he is
the one to approve translations and commit them.

Current status pages for Kurdish are at:

  http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.12/ku/index.html


Today at 12:37, Erdal Ronahi wrote:

> thanks for the warm words. To translate software into Kurdish is a
> great challenge indeed. Although close to 40 Million people speak
> Kurdish, it could not develop well, because it has been forbidden in
> Turkey, where most Kurds live. Still it is not been taught at any
> state school - let alone university. So we have to create a wholly
> "new" computer terminology, which makes this task very difficult.

That's a case even with some smaller language communities which didn't
have a lot of IT in the past.  We (the Serbian team) solved that by
creating an online dictionary (where anyone can suggest translations,
vote for them, etc.): http://recnik.prevod.org/nadji/file to look at
how do the suggestions for "file" look like :)

There is one thing to keep in mind: don't strive for perfect solutions
right away, it will only hold you back.  Go with what you have, and
improve as you go.  For instance, changing our terminology for
"folder" word has happened only 18 months after first translations
came in, and it was fairly simple to do, along with other updates.


Cheers,
Danilo