Re: kursdok

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@skolelinux.no>]

Tirsdag 17 juli 2007 22:30, skrev Holger Levsen:
> .. I think you / we / the norwegian government is on a wrong track or
> throwing money out of the window, by founding the ITIL book (as it
> is), which is written in norwegian instead of english. 

I don't think you really understand why native languages has great 
importance for pupils in schools, also the school authorities. I 
perceive that your right in what you are implying, getting ITIL doc 
translated to English. But you got a hell of a bad way of presenting 
it, stepping right into the wasp nest of langauges. So please bear with 
me. 

Let my exemplify. The Spanish Extremadura project got a lot of good 
things written in their native language. Do they "throwing money out of 
the window" too, since they not translate their stuff into English as 
default, but keep things in Spanish?

A lot of English speaking people take it for granted that everything are 
handed over to them, and that people everywhere should finance English 
translations ahead of their own language. Thats pretty arrogant because 
most people in the world, more than 90% speak other[1] languages than 
English. More people speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as their native 
language. 

1. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

In respect of size there are more Spanish native speakers in the world 
compared to English. Mandarin Chinese got twice the size compared to 
English. If our goal is to be international, and get more users to use 
free software, we should choose Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and maybe 
Arabic as our prioritised languages. Most regions in Spain and China 
got a preference policy for Free Software. Let English speaking nations 
waist their money, paying twice or more for their computer effort in 
schools compared to regions or countries preferring GNU/Linux ...

> Being an 
> international _and_ volunteer based project, it doesn't make sense for
> us and/or isn't possible to maintain the non-english ITIL book.

Just to underline my point to show respect for native languages, why 
should not Arabic be prioritised instead? 

* To the point: 

Yes, in the point of getting translations done to several languages, 
English could be good as an intermediate language for other languages, 
even if more pupils speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. 

> So kursdok should be included in the ITIL document. Fine by me, I
> couldn't care less (literally), as it's completely useless to me and
> also useless for my work on debian-edu.

I got almost same question at DebianDay in Glasgow a month ago. A person 
asked if there was a overview of pedagogic programs. I said yes, there 
is made such overview both by LinEx in Spain and by Skolelinux in 
Norwegians. I had just a bit earlier pointed out the point of providing 
applications and documentation in native language in schools. 

Kids have no means to interpret English when starting at schools in most 
countries in the world. When our overview of software is not in 
English, British people get the same treat a lot of proprietary 
software products gives 95% of the worlds population, expecting them to 
speak English. So now British people, kind of, get the same treat ... 
We don't wont that of cource, hoping that we can provide documents and 
overview on English too. But then we need more volunteers, I pointed 
out. People got a laugh, also the person who asked the question :)

My point is, if we want people to improve or translate it, the 
documentation has to widely spread. You newer know where new 
contributors appears. In the earlier days it was two US citizen who 
translated KDE to Norwegian. They used KDE translation as a tool for 
learning Norwegian. Believe that ...

So spreading the stuff, make it easily available, will also make it 
easier for whomever to contribute. 

> But, I haven't found the original svn-location of the kursdok, so I
> couldn't execute the licence switch to GPL there. Anybody an idea
> where it is?

I think it's in skolelinux svn: 

http://developer.skolelinux.no/kurs/kursdok.sgml

Skolelinux svn: 

svn checkout 
svn+ssh://<your-username>@svn.skolelinux.no/repos/skolelinux/trunk/www/www.developer.skolelinux.no/kurs

Anonymous svn: 
svn checkout 
svn://svn.skolelinux.no/repos/skolelinux/trunk/www/www.developer.skolelinux.no/kurs

> svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-edu/trunk/src/debian-edu-doc/docu
>mentation/norwegian/kurs/ is what I know about, but this only has the
> .html and the .pdf file, no source files :(

I shall see what I can do. 

I also agree that things should be translated to English. But The 
Norwegian Scandinavian governments mostly cares about translating from 
English to Norwegian. Hopefully someone will be inspired, helping out 
to translate ITIL doc from Norwegian to English. By spreading it out, I 
hope that more people will see this as a worth while effort :)

Best regards

Knut Yrvin