Re: Regular use of software translated into "Esperanto"?
Hi Christian,
I know plenty of Esperanto speakers who indeed use Esperanto
interfaces in their installed software. (And also in the interfaces of
websites they visit, when that's an option.)
English seems clearly the dominant language of open source software
(and many other things), and I think the situation with respect to
Esperanto is essentially the same as with other non-English languages,
and the choices of people who speak languages besides English:
1. Many non-native speakers of English use the English interface of
software and websites, typically either because they suppose that the
English interface is the most polished and up-to-date of the offered
language choices, or because it is a way to improve their English
"passively" while doing stuff at their computer.
2. Many other non-native speakers of English use some other preferred
language (whether Esperanto or German or Lithuanian or whatever),
because they know it better and read it more easily, or simply because
they prefer it, or because they are learning it (i.e. "passive
learning" again).
3. Many other people simply can't read English well enough to use the
English interface, so they have no choice but to use some other
language interface. (And of course that includes some Esperanto
speakers who don't know English.)
I suppose many open source projects have languages that are less
actively supported than English, but if a language is already there in
the project, it seems worth keeping it there even if it has no current
maintainers, because in the future someone might pick up the torch and
start working on it again.
On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 10:13 AM <c.buhtz@posteo.jp> wrote:
>
> Hello folks,
>
> I know not much about Esperanto, only what I can read at Wikipedia.
>
> I'm member of the upstream maintenance team of "Back In Time" [1][2].
> Currently the project do partly offer Esperanto [3]. Because of
> ressourrces and maintainability I think about removing that language
> from the project. You might helping me understanding some points about
> Esperanto.
>
> I wonder if Esperanto speaking people do use there software that way? I
> know that Debian offers Esperanto. Do you know about how many users this
> are?
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong here. To my knowledge Esperanto is a
> foreign (not mother tongue) language to the most people even the
> Esperanto speakers them self. But some do grew up with Esperanto and it
> is their mother tongue language. But it keeps their secondary mother
> tongue language. They grew up in countries where Esperanto isn't the
> primary language. Is there any country where it is primary language?
>
> Am I right so far?
>
> So I wonder if it make sense to translate the GUI of a software into
> Esperanto.
>
> From a technological point of view: In most cases (except the Esperanto
> Debian users) the system language isn't Esperanto? So Esperanto isn't
> selected by default when installing a software. You have to explicit
> choose that in the settings of a specific software. Right?
>
> Of course from the cultural and political perspective it make sense as a
> "statement". It could be compared to translate software into minority
> (e.g. Native American languages) or "forgotten" languages. But my
> project don't have the resources for "statements".
>
> Hope you can clear up some of that.
>
> Kind
> Christian
>
> [1] -- <https://github.com/bit-team/backintime>
> [2] -- <https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/backintime>
> [3] -- <https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/backintime/common/eo/>
>
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