But it should be possible to get signficant native language coverage of important information if you do a good job of separating important static content from dynamic content and prioritizing the static content.

For example the main page for the Fedora Project http://fedoraproject.org/ is offered in many languages, you’ll see the language selection box in the lower left hand corner. That page is reasonably static as are a few other important links off that page. But the Fedora wiki is not static, and as a result links from that main page into the wiki doesn’t always bring you to natively translated content.

When doing translation work you have to prioritize. In Fedora the release notes are prioritized highly.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/

as well as the primarily static web pages off of the main page
http://fedoraproject.org/hu/index
http://fedoraproject.org/hu/get-fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/hu/join-fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/hu/get-help

There is an effort to translate the wiki as well
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Languages

There is still room for improvement of course. The get-help page could refer to the specific irc channel for that language when it exists instead making people hit the wiki page that lists all the different irc channels.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate#IRC

And looking at the Ubuntu wiki Jaunty’s release notes have translations as well. What’s not clear to me is how you actually discover them without knowing how the wiki is structured. I don’t see a language pull down box or a listing of available languages.

Starting from the main page: http://www.ubuntu.com/
and following only a set of links or webpage elements (not typing in an actual URL,) can you tell me how to get to the German translated release notes for Jaunty? They exist, but I don’t know how to navigate to them.

It’s a little odd to me that the Ubuntu community makes the effort to do the hard work of translating the release notes, but then that effort is stuck in a corner and quite difficult to find without using some intuition about how the Ubuntu wiki is organized. How is a new native Germany speaking user expected to discover the release notes? Or for that matter discover the correct ubuntu iso image to download and use?

I’m not sure if any of the other Jaunty web based material like the desktop tour is available in other languages. It could be there, and I don’t know how to access it.

-jef

I’m glad that you are free to use the language version of your choice.

My message to the scoundrels complaining about localization – use the English version and do yourself a favor. Localization should be of relatively low priority compared to the OS itself and functionality, IMO.

You can’t use features unless you can understand them; usability is thus as important as functionality. Even if you don’t buy that, the UI is certainly part of the OS. Despite its reputation as being easy, English is a difficult language. In a free market, the customer is always right. Put those all together, and localization becomes of prime imporatance.

If a foremost concern is to make good use of localization resources, then the important question is not, “which Ubuntu users speak XXXX language natively?”, but rather, “who would use Ubuntu if localized into XXXX language?”. The assumption implicit in the first question is that only native speakers of a language will ultimately want to use software in that language. For most languages, that may be a good rule of thumb, but not for some, such as Esperanto. About 2,000,000 people speak Esperanto, most (all but about 2,000) as non-natives. Esperanto is several times easier to learn than other languages, including English, even for speakers of non-Indo-European languages, and its speakers are scattered surprisingly evenly around the world, so it’s not all that far-fetched that a significant number of Ubuntu users would not have enough of it localized into their native languages, and would feel far more comfortable with Esperanto than with some other language.

I’m sure there are some linguists and classicists out there who would enjoy using Linux in these languages, but aren’t there better ways to use the free-software community’s resources right now?

For most Esperanto speakers, Esperanto is more than a mere academic curiosity. It is a real, living language with as much expressive power as any other living, natural language.

The comment “aren’t there better ways to use…” assumes that if Esperanto localization resources are somehow drawing resources away from other languages – that if they didn’t work on Esperanto, they would or could be persuaded to work on other languages instead, and that no one else could be enticed to work on those other languages. Esperanto localizers do not prevent anyone else from working on other languages, and based on my knowledge of the Esperanto community, I think it unlikely they would spontaneously work on other languages, especially if prevented from working on the Esperanto version.

Computers are one of the best ways to learn English. Taught me a lot more than the pathetic public school system.

My message to the scoundrels complaining about localization – use the English version and do yourself a favor. Localization should be of relatively low priority compared to the OS itself and functionality, IMO.