Re: Regular use of software translated into "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?
I've become used to seeing Esperanto messages from some of the
programs I use.
> Is there any
> country where it is primary language?
No.
> 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?
I'm not sure about that. Certainly you can set LANGUAGE=eo:la:sa in
your shell and then get messages in Esperanto/Latin/Sanskrit from any
program you invoke from the shell, if the program has any of those
languages. In Debian /etc/default/locale sets LANGUAGE. Do other Linux
distributions do something similar?
> 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".
I think it's probably best to treat Esperanto the same as any other
language and try to apply the same reasonably objective criteria.
I think you might as well accept a translation into any language as a
contribution to the upstream source. Even an incomplete translation
might inspire someone else to contribute to it, so it might eventually
become complete, and a translation in one language might occasionally
help someone doing the translation into another language.
Which languages to include in a default build is another question. You
could include every language, and that might be a reasonable thing to
do with some software, but there is the disadvantage that some users
will then see a mixture of languages, which could be confusing. So one
thing you could perhaps do as an upstream maintainer is have a
manually maintained po/LINGUAS file (or equivalent) that lists only
the languages that meet your criteria for well-maintained-ness. A
month before you do a release you could e-mail translators whose
languages are at risk of being removed from the that list.
Package maintainers and people who build from source could then choose
to include a bigger or a smaller set of languages, but most will
probably just follow the upstream default, so the "problem" of a user
with LANGUAGE=eo:de:en seeing 20% of the messages in Esperanto, 78% in
German, and 2% in English, for example, would be avoided.
Edmund
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