Re: kursdok

[Kurt Gramlich <kurt@skolelinux.de>]

* Knut Yrvin <knuty@skolelinux.no> [070718 00:29]:

> 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. 

I support this strongly, we need skolelinux for schools and
teachers in native language.

Thats why we have more than 3000 pages in our german wiki, more
than 400 registered users and about 200 homepages.
> 
> 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

thanks for this link!

> 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. 

There is also a big overview in the german wiki:

http://wiki.skolelinux.de/

And our statistik counts the following hits:

 105443 SeiteFinden (serching page)
  49692 SkoleLinux (main page)
  22988 DownLoad 
  21785 AktuelleAenderungen (resent changes)
  17262 LernSoftware (overview about free teaching software)

So you could say, one of the most important page is LernSoftware.

> 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. 

In January 2006 we agreed to start with wikis in different
languages to make it easy, to join the project. As i see, this
still works in Germany.

What we now need, is to coordinate the information flow
internationaly. So i ask for volunters to help with translation:

Norwegian to German, English to German (easy), German to English,
German to French and now getting important: Spanisch to German.

[...]

> 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 :)
I agree also, that things should be translated to English.

Perhaps we are soon able to motivate some Americans to help to translate all
the Norwegian, Spanisch and German Information to English ;-)

> Best regards
> 
> Knut Yrvin

Thanks Knut!

Regards/AmicaLinuxement/Saludos/Viele Gruesse!
Kurt Gramlich
Projektleitung skolelinux.de
-- 
kurt@skolelinux.de
GnuPG Key ID 0xE263FCD4
http://www.skolelinux.de