10.29.09

Danish is coming (Turkish, too)

Posted in Camino, Open Source at 2:17 am by Smokey

Taking another break from working on tasks for the Camino 2 release, I wanted to write a little bit about our amazing team of localizers tonight. As if someone was reading my mind, Christopher Henderson showed us this tweet he came across tonight.

Camino 2 is likely going to ship in English and 13 other languages (attentive readers will note that this is down by two from the number of languages in Camino 1.6.10, but still three more than shipped in the initial Camino 1.6 release), all translated by our volunteer localizers from the caminol10n project. New to Camino 2 will be Danish (which last appeared in the Camino 1.0 series) and Turkish, making its debut as a Camino localization.

The story of Danish in Camino 2 is particularly worth telling. At the end of September, about two weeks after we released Camino 2.0 Beta 4, Danish Camino user Allan Nyholm Nielsen posted a message in the Camino discussion forum asking why Camino 1.6 was localized in Swedish and Norwegian but not Danish, and whether Camino 2 would include a Danish translation. A member of the Camino development team replied that our localizations are all produced by volunteers and that while there had been a Danish localization in Camino 1.0.x and some work had been done for Camino 1.5, the leader of that team disappeared and the translation for 1.5 was never finished. We also pointed Allan to the caminol10n project (and to another Danish Camino user on the forum, David Munch, who could possibly help) and urged him to think about reviving the Danish translation.

The very next day, Allan had posted to the caminol10n mailing list (and back in the Camino discussion forum) stating that he had signed up and had gotten started. Two weeks after that, Allan posted a message stating that he had essentially completed the translation of Camino 2 into Danish, and, after a week of polishing the translation, he reported he had the complete translation ready.

In three weeks, we went from having no Danish translation and only an interested user who had never done any Mac OS X application localization to having a complete, peer-reviewed Danish localization for Camino 2.0! Congratulations to Allan and David on this achievement.

If you would like to see Camino in your language, you too can make it a reality. While not every language has a localization of an older version of Camino available to jump-start the process (there are a dozen languages that have shipped in past Camino versions that will not be in Camino 2.0, however), and while some teams take longer to complete a translation than others, you can still get started today and perhaps be ready to include your language in Camino 2.0.1 or 2.0.2. There are a few, relatively simple, specialized tools to learn, but for the most part all you need to know is English and your own language. There might even be other speakers of your language already interested in helping, and the existing Camino translators are knowledgeable and can help you get started with the tools.

The Danish experience is not an isolated case, either; during the Camino 1.6.x series, we added three new languages, and one of them was complete in a matter of weeks (one took a month or so, and the third we learned about only when it was already complete).

If your language is already included in Camino, be sure to thank the members of your language’s translation team and ask them if there is any way you can help; existing teams are usually looking for new members, too, to help spread the workload.

Finally, it is with sadness that I report that Catalan, Czech, Polish, and Portuguese (pt-BR) will be missing from Camino 2.0, so if you are a Camino user who speaks one of those languages, now is the time for you to get involved. Register with the caminol10n project, join the mailing list, and bring your language back to Camino.

Permalink