Re: New team for Western Frisian (fy)

[Sense Hofstede <qense ubuntu com>]

On 20 April 2010 00:17, Wouter Bolsterlee <wbolster gnome org> wrote:
> Op zaterdag 17-04-2010 om 13:33 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Sense
> Hofstede:
>> Recently we've been working in Ubuntu to get a translation team for
>> the Western Frisian language up and running. KDE has got a reasonably
>> active translation team for Western Frisian, but GNOME has always
>> lacked translations for the language spoken in a Dutch province with a
>> million inhabitants. Now we've got something up and running in Ubuntu
>> we'd like to contribute the translations back upstream for other
>> projects to benefit from them. Furthermore, a centralised,
>> distro-agnostic, place for translating makes it easier for Frisian
>> users of distributions that are not a member of the Ubuntu family to
>> help out.
>
> Hi Sense,
>
> Nice to see more translator activity in the Netherlands. I'm the current
> coordinator for the Dutch translation team, and was wondering whether
> the Frisian translation
>
>      * could benefit from using Dutch as a fallback instead of falling
>        back to English for non-translated strings. However, I don't
>        know if this is technically possible at all.

This was fixed by Arne Goetje in Launchpad bug #537540 --
<https://launchpad.net/bugs/537540> -- by adding the lines "Frisian
(DE);1;fy;fy_DE.UTF-8;fy;DE;fy_DE:fy:de_DE:de:en_GB:en;kbd=lat0-sun16(utf8)"
and "Frisian (NL);1;fy;fy_NL.UTF-8;fy;NL;fy_NL:fy:nl_NL:nl:en_GB:en;kbd=lat0-sun16(utf8)"
to the file 'data/languagelist' in the 'language-selector' package.
I'm not sure if this patch was or can be forwarded upstream. I assume
these strings are used by the language selector when setting the
locale environment.

>      * should have the same style and naming conventions as the Dutch
>        translations do, since the languages are grammatically really
>        similar and the Frisian team could benefit from the experience
>        the Dutch team has. For instance, in Dutch we avoid imperatives
>        and use infinitives as much as possible, and I think the Frisian
>        translation should do that as well.
We don't have any conventions for this (yet), but I would think it
would be the best way to follow the English standards as Frisian is
more closely related to English than to Dutch. Although its vocabulary
may have shifted more towards Dutch, its grammar still has some
distinct differences from Dutch. However, your argument in a later
mail that using the same conventions to make the fallback experience
more seamless is a good one. But I do think we should try to follow
guidelines that bring us the best translations on the long term and
our goal is to translate at least the default, visible desktop to
Frisian. In that case the fallback experience would be less of a
trouble.

>
> This message is CC'ed to the Gnome-NL mailing list, and I think further
> discussion is appropriate as a crossposted thread to both
> <ubuntu-l10n-fy lists launchpad net> and <gnome-nl-list gnome org>. The
> general Gnome i18n mailing list <gnome-i18n gnome org> can then be left
> out.
>
> We kunnen het vervolg op deze e-mails dan ook gewoon in het Nederlands
> schrijven... [1] :)
>
>    — Wouter
>
> [1] This also means we can just write e-mail follow-ups in Dutch... :)
>

-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]